top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Then, of course, there are those sad occasions when a poet or a writer has not grown, and one has to let them go because they're just not making headway. But we have a very clear personal relationship with the authors."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Literature quotes
"The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth."
"Stories are like children. They grow in their own way."
"In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself."
"It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then."
"It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel."
"The literary man re-reads, other men simply read."
"And she never could remember and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book."
"One of the most dangerous of literary ventures is the little, shy, unimportant heroine whom none of the other characters value. The danger is that your readers may agree with the other characters."
"Like someone excitedly relating a story, only to find the words petering out, the path gets narrower the further I go, the undergrowth taking over."
"I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else."
Explore more quotes by James Laughlin
"It's all well and good to say that Germans were all responsible for the concentration camps, but I don't think they were. I think that was the work of a small group of fiends."
"Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going."
"Often something comes in from which you can see that the person is good, the book may not be perfect as it is, and the person doesn't want to do a re-write. That's something we do almost nothing of."
"I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention."
"I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian."
"We do very little re-writing in the office. We often take on people who show great promise and who we hope will develop into somebody important and someone good."
"The German experience, as you can see, did move me very much. Seeing that terrible destruction and seeing the miserable state of the people, how they had been beaten down by the war through no fault of their own probably."
"I do read everything that we publish. We usually have to have two or three votes for a book before we take it on. So in that sense I suppose it is an orchestra."
"Every now and then, I strike something that just goes click, you know, in my head. As Gertrude Stein used to say, it rings the bell, and I feel, this is great."
"I think there is a great difference, in that when the poet is reading you get the whole personality of the person, especially if he's a good reader. Whereas a person just sitting gets what he puts into it."
bottom of page