Robert Gottlieb Quotes

I've tried to slow this down but realized that my natural reading rhythm is freakishly fast when an author friend asked me to go through the manuscript of her soon-to-be-published book for continuity errors.

I confess that reading proofs is a pleasure. It stimulates and inspires me.

We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.

I don't know if I officially proofread my father's book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

The writer marks the changes he wants to make, while a proofreader also goes through the galley, checking it page-by-page against the manuscript. Once all these changes are identified, a second-pass proof is made, and this, too, gets sent to the author and the proofreader, and the process begins anew.

When you find that a book is poor ... waste no more time upon it.

An editor is like a professional reader, and as I became a better reader, I also became a better writer.

I'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.

It may be important to write a book that doesn't come up to what I would like to have rather than to write no book at all.

Once you've finished typing and moving text around and everything else, you have to leave it alone for a while. You do that to see if it stands up, to see if all the loose edges have been trimmed, if it makes sense, if it's consistent, what shape it really has. You can't tell that while you're working on it.

I do a project, and then I move on.

Many poets, as you know, are not good readers.

There are a lot of bottlenecks to getting published. Publishers are only one of them. Having the time is another one. Feeling entitled is another one.

Copy editors are very important and too rarely praised.

Like all editors, I assume, I'm a reactor.

I do think digital media encourages speed-reading, which can be fine if one is simply seeking information. But a serious novel or work of history or volume of poetry is an experience one should savor, take time over.

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.

I don't think of myself as a fast reader. I just read a lot. When someone else might think, 'I might do the dishes,' I don't. But then the dishes multiply.

I probably spend 90% of my time revising what I've written.

Five people read my work before its ready for publication, and I solicit opinions from all of them: my wife, my agent, my editor, and my parents.

The minimum I need is six months to allow for dithering, procrastination and the research. The research times varies from book to book; some are faster because they're based off resources I have at my disposal.

I spent the entire morning inserting a comma; I spent the whole afternoon removing it again.

Everybody needs an editor.

I am a stupendously fast reader and always have been. I can read in at least three languages fluently and two languages with a little bit more difficulty.

Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.