Jonathan Galassi > Quotes

“Being in love is arguably the least productive of human states.”
― Jonathan Galassi, Muse

“He’d come to appreciate that writers were just like everyone else, except when they were more so. It sometimes seemed that they’d been able to develop their gifts thanks to a lack of inhibition, an inner permission to feel and react, that made them seem self-absorbed and insensitive to the existence of anyone else.”
― Jonathan Galassi, Muse

“The charred smell came, he assumed, from the pages themselves, burning away invisibly as they had for years in the Impetus vault in New York. Eventually they would crumble and be lost to the world, if they weren’t thrown away first. For today, though, they were his to inhale and get lost in.”
― Jonathan Galassi, Muse

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

“Venice was a hallucinatory incubus, the most artificial environment in the world: Disneyland for grown-ups. It reeked of sex and its putrescent partner, death. Thomas Mann had caught its rouged, feverish aura perfectly.”
― Jonathan Galassi, Muse

“It was the artists who finally gave their times and places significance. Paul felt the presence of their ghosts out in the world, just as felt them in his office and in his head. The air was full of them. They were everywhere and always would be.”
― Jonathan Galassi, Muse

“Love in the flesh remained elusive. It drew yet frightened him. This was the late eighties, after all, the most terrifying days of the plague. Surrounded everywhere by insolent youth and beauty, Paul looked and lusted but didn’t dare touch.”
― Jonathan Galassi, Muse

“In 90 percent of cases, you could tell within a page or two whether the writer could write.”
― Jonathan Galassi, Muse

“Well, I thought it was a dog, and the critics did, too. Woof.”
― Jonathan Galassi, Muse

“These little irises could be your eyes’
if they were twice as large and twice as dark,
but if I got inside them–can I find
the vein that is the tunnel to your heart?
I may be in there: I see signs of movement
under the silky shadow/luminescence;
is it feeling’s fierce integument
or a more troubled, more elusive essence?
Your other eyes have locked me out sometimes
(they have good reason to) but not ignored
the guilty pleading boring out from mine
there are no words for, as there are no words
for what these lacquer seeds say. Irritation
brought them on, but patience made them pearls,
the same slow labor that piles years of pages up–
call it obsession, plodding, imitation,
pigheadedness, simplicity, devotion:
Out of the dented life burled nacre curls
until the final jewel locks rays and rages up.
Remember when you wear these little worlds.”
― Jonathan Galassi, Nearsights: Selected Poems of Valerio Magrelli

“Publishing would be so wonderful without those wretched authors.”
― Jonathan Galassi, Muse

“Most of the smaller houses had been gobbled up by so-called general-interest publishers, most of them now owned in turn by much bigger conglomerates who’d publish anything they could get their hands on that had a chance of making money.”
― Jonathan Galassi, Muse

“her “lifelong need to seem normal.”
― Jonathan Galassi, Muse

“Our real poems are already in us / and all we can do is dig. / We can work for years and never find them / or miss them when they stare us in the face.”
― Jonathan Galassi

“It was one of the realities of publishing: what was truly new often languished in the warehouse nearly unasked-for. One of the tricks of publishing was catching the wave of public taste at the right moment.”
― Jonathan Galassi, Muse

“You’re not one of those despicable literary sleuths who think he can deduce every last little sordid biographical detail from a writer’s work, are you?”
― Jonathan Galassi, Muse

“This is a love story. It’s about the good old days, when men were men and women were women and books were books.”
― Jonathan Galassi, Muse

“Paul believed in believers—not the credulous religious, but those who aspired to move the needle, to add something to the world.”
― Jonathan Galassi, Muse

“When, I want to know, do writers get to simply live their boring lives?”
― Jonathan Galassi, Muse

“For all his profanity and bedroom antics, though, Homer was a relative prude when it came to misbehaving on the page.”
― Jonathan Galassi, Muse

“The literary publishers were the Lords of Culture, the master parasites sitting on top of this swarming dunghill.”
― Jonathan Galassi, Muse

“Out with the old; in with the aftermath.”
― Jonathan Galassi, Muse

“It didn’t matter what you said as long as you were quoted.”
― Jonathan Galassi, Muse

“One sunny moment, moving inexorably toward sepia.”
― Jonathan Galassi, Muse

“They’d all chatted cordially about the weather, their children, and various authors, steering clear, for the most part, of the ones they’d ‘shared’ (i.e. fought over) and moving on to the general decline of the business and the perfidy of agents – subjects the two old lions were in utter agreement about.”
― Jonathan Galassi, Muse