Status Updates From Jérôme Lindon

“We laugh, and I truly believe that we genuinely like each other.”

“still, you shouldn’t think that the man is cold, brusque, authoritarian, unemotional, and who knows what else - quite the contrary. In fact, he’s passionate, he can be moved, he laughs, he lights up, he rejoiced just as easily as he gets indignant or up in arms… the issue is that he had other things on his mind than being like able; like ability is not his concern.”

“I quickly realized from Jerome London that an editor has other things to do, or at least, he does. He has no patience for hand-wringing, and despises it when someone takes him for what he’s not, whether surrogate father, confessor, or therapist.”

“… Jerome Lindon explains not only why my book is bad, but also how it’s bad, so why and how I went about it the way I did, why and how it was wrong of me to go about it the way I did, why and how I was wrong of me to be wrong. In this exercise, he is remarkable.”

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