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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Jonathan Galassi Quotes

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.

– Jonathan Galassi

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

– Jonathan Galassi

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

– Jonathan Galassi

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

– Jonathan Galassi

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.

– 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?

– Jonathan Galassi

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.

– Jonathan Galassi

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.

– Jonathan Galassi

Writing is inherently scary.

– Jonathan Galassi

I deal with the authors I work with, agents, and other departments of the company, talking about both the books that I’m working on and everyone else’s. Then there’s dealing with foreign publishers: foreigners visit all the time. People want to bounce things off the publisher, and a lot of it is encouragement.

– Jonathan Galassi

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.

– Jonathan Galassi

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.

– Jonathan Galassi

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.

– Jonathan Galassi

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

– Jonathan Galassi

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

– Jonathan Galassi

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

– Jonathan Galassi

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.

– Jonathan Galassi

What the beautiful-writing writers are most attached to is almost always superfluous.

– Jonathan Galassi

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

I think poetry was always where I went to deal with my deepest feelings.

– Jonathan Galassi

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.

– Jonathan Galassi

I’ve always loved the poetry in ‘Pale Fire.’ I think it’s wonderful.

– Jonathan Galassi

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

– Jonathan Galassi

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

– Jonathan Galassi

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

– Jonathan Galassi

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.

– Jonathan Galassi