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" I was nearly 40 when I published my first book. I was a slow starter - or rather, I was slow to gather my work together, though I had published translations, mainly of the Italian poet Montale, by then. "

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" Giving oneself permission to write to begin with is the first enormous challenge. But you discover that this permission involves a requirement: To write about things that are difficult because they are, in fact, your subject. "

Jonathan Galassi

You

Giving

Fact

" Eugenio Montale - born in Genoa in 1896, died in Milan, 1981 - is one of the twentieth-century Europeans who has spoken most meaningfully to American and British poets. "

" When you're in the throes of writing, I find, the lessons you've casually imparted to others are not in the forefront of your mind. Which may be good or bad. Probably both. "

" I think publishers need to be the ones that publish the books and control that process: finding writers, helping them with their work, finding readers. I think writers need that. "

" The thing that happened with the music business, there are no stores anymore where you can buy music. It's all an online business now, and that's, you know - the bookstore culture is a very vibrant part of the American experience that we're very reluctant to see go away. "

Jonathan Galassi

Business

Experience

" After college, I went to England and studied for a couple years. "

" The only thing you can really say in a poem is what you really, really deeply believe. "

" An e-book distributor is not a publisher, but rather a purveyor of work that has already been created. "

" Writing is inherently scary. "

" If you've worked in a company for a long time, there's a mythology that you know by heart, you don't need to look it up to evoke. It's there in your blood, as it were. "

" My biggest concern about the market is the force that acts to drive down price, because I think that's destructive to authors as well as publishers. Our biggest battle is to underline the value of intellectual property. "

" A lot of great authors are published before their time. That's not wrong; it's just the way it works. "

" Claiming your life for yourself feels like a huge deal until you do it. "

Jonathan Galassi

Deal

Life

" My poems are always about my life in one way or another. "

" Be patient, work hard and consistently, have faith in your writing, and don't be afraid to listen to constructive criticism. "

" I'll tell you - there's no author that wants to give his mother an e-book of his new book. I think he wants to present her with - or she - wants to present her with something beautiful that he or she created. "

" That's one thing about fiction: you can make the world be the way you think it should be. "

" The FSG story starts to lose its fairy-tale aura when filthy lucre invades the sacred enclosure, as it did ubiquitously in the every-man-for-himself Reagan era. "

" I think that a really good agent should be able to get the right publisher, which the agent has already figured out, get as much money as she can from that publisher, and make a deal, rather than have the amount of money determine the sale. That's what the best agents do. "

" As the publisher of FSG and the custodian of its legacy, I have an interested insider's view. "

" The price of an e-book is a lot less than the price that we're charging for a hardcover book. It's about the same as we charge for a paperback. And that means a different revenue stream. "

" I've always used poetry to explain myself to myself. These things just sat in my psyche and then came out. "

" There's been a fragmentation of how the market functions, but I believe printed books are here to stay. People like the tactile experience, the smell of them; there's a great romance to them. "

Jonathan Galassi

Believe

People

" Elizabeth Bishop in particular had a big impact on me personally as well as artistically. Her insistence on clarity is something I rate very highly. "

" I feel that there is not an endlessly expandable universe of fiction readers. "

" I love poetry; it's my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems - close reading - can carry over into how you read other things. "

" Poetry is really about your mental state or intellectual, and where you are, and you're trying to evoke that, explain it to yourself, whatever, you're trying to dig into it, analyse yourself. "

" Editing is more by-the-hip. You look at a text and ask yourself how it can be improved. "

" John Updike's first published book was a collection of poems. "

" A translation needs to read convincingly. There's no limit to what can go into it in terms of background research, feeling, or your own interests in form and history. But what should come out is something that reads as convincing English-language text. "