JONATHAN GALASSI

There's been a fragmentation of how the market functions, but I believe printed books are here to stay. People like the tactile experience, the smell of them; there's a great romance to them.

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.

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

Writing is inherently scary.

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.

A publisher - and I write as one - does far more than print and sell a book. It selects, nurtures, positions and promotes the writer's work.

Editing is more by-the-hip. You look at a text and ask yourself how it can be improved.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

A lot of great authors are published before their time. That's not wrong; it's just the way it works.

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.

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.

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

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

John Updike's first published book was a collection of poems.

An e-book distributor is not a publisher, but rather a purveyor of work that has already been created.

I never thought I could write fiction.

There are courses you can take to learn the mechanics of the business, like the Radcliffe course, but I don't think they teach you how to edit.