Jonathan Galassi

“Poetry is not mainstream, but then neither is serious fiction, really. But I don't think there's a lot to worry about in this particular 'problem'. Why does art have to be mainstream to be significant?”

“I think that the continuity of what I do as an editor with what I did when I started out 40 years ago is very direct. The delivery system is changing and will continue to, but the actual interaction between publisher and author is exactly the same.”

“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.”

“Writing is inherently scary.”

“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.”

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

“I think poetry should be read very much like prose, except that the line breaks should be acknowledged somehow.”

“Don’t give me that Christian forgiveness bullshit, Dukach. I’m a vindictive Jew!” he’d bellow.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Everything is different - except for publishing itself: getting hold of an amazing author, working to make his or her book the best and best-looking it can be, telling the world.”

“I've always loved the poetry in 'Pale Fire.' I think it's wonderful.”

“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.”

“The Futurists believed in the machine, in making a great big fuss, in being young. For a brief moment, they were arguably the most influential aesthetic provocateurs in the world.”

“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.”

“Poems are endlessly renewable resources. Whatever you bring to them, at whatever stage of life, gets mirrored back, refracted, reread in new ways.”

“I wanted to be involved with literature. I certainly wasn't going to be able to write for a living, and I didn't have enough confidence in my talent to think that I should be just doing that. Publishing seemed like fun to me - to be involved with writers. And it did turn out to be.”

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

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

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