Betsy Lerner Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

Fear of failure is the reason most often cited to explain why so many aspiring writers never realize their dreams. But I think it's that same fear of failure that absolutely invigorates those who do push through-that is, the fear of not being heard.

Betsy Lerner
Asking for advice about what you should write is a little like asking for help getting dressed. I can you tell you what I think looks good, but you have to wear it. And as every fashion victim knows, very few people look good in everything.

Betsy Lerner
Indeed, the great paradox of the writer's life is how much time he spends alone trying to connect with other people.

Betsy Lerner
But editors are still the world's readers. And thus the eyes of the world.

Betsy Lerner
The world doesn't fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life.

Betsy Lerner
The writer labors in isolation, yet all that intensive, lonely work is in the service of communicating, is an attempt to reach another person.

Betsy Lerner
But I also believe there is enormous value in the piece of writing that goes no further than the one person for whom it was intended, that no combination of written words is more eloquent than those exchanged in letters between lovers or friends, or along the pale blue lines of private diaries, where people take communion with themselves.

Betsy Lerner
No matter how many compromises were made along the way, no matter what happens in the future, a book is a thing to behold.

Betsy Lerner
In discovering books, you became free to explore the full range of human motives, desires, secrets, and lies. All my life, people have scolded me for having an excess of feeling, saying that I was too sensitive - as if one could be in danger from feeling too much instead of too little. But my outsize emotions were well represented in books. [...] there simmered all the feelings no one ever admits to.

Betsy Lerner
When an editor works with an author, she cannot help seeing into the medicine cabinet of his soul. All the terrible emotions, the desire for vindications, the paranoia, and the projection are bottled in there, along with all the excesses of envy, desire for revenge, all the hypochondriacal responses, rituals, defenses, and the twin obsessions with sex and money. It other words, the stuff of great books.

Betsy Lerner
But every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood.

Betsy Lerner