Quotes from Jonathan Galassi

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.

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

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.

One thing I have noticed is that when you're a younger editor, you're more intense about it. As you go along, you relax a little. More and more, I feel that the book is the author's. You give the author your thoughts, and it's up to him or her to decide what to do.

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

I can write anywhere that's quiet. I have a study in my apartment, but I often work in the kitchen of a house that we rent in the country.

There's an old saw about journalism that the more you know about a subject, the less sense reporting about it makes.

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.

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?

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.

Writing is inherently scary.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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