Robert Gottlieb Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

Your job as an editor is to figure out what the book needs, but the writer has to provide it. You can't be the one who says, Send him to Hong Kong at this point, let him have a love affair with a cocker spaniel. Rather, you say, This book needs something at this point: it needs opening up, it needs a direction, it needs excitement.

Robert Gottlieb
The first thing writers want — and this sounds so basic, but you'd be surprised how unbasic it is in the publishing world — is a quick response. Once they've finished a new manuscript and put it in the mail, they exist in a state of suspended emotional and psychic animation until they hear from their editor, and it's cruelty to animals to keep them waiting.

Robert Gottlieb
Editing is simply the application of the common sense of any good reader. That's why, to be an editor, you have to be a reader. It's the number one qualification. Because you could have all the editorial tools, but if you're not a responsive reader you won't sense where the problems lie.

Robert Gottlieb
You have to surrender to a book. If you do, when something in it seems to be going askew, you are wounded. The more you have surrendered to a book, the more jarring its errors appear.

Robert Gottlieb
I have fixed more sentences than most people have read in their lives.

Robert Gottlieb
If you try to turn a book into something it isn't, you're doomed to disaster.

Robert Gottlieb
Of course, if anybody says nice things about me in print it's pleasant. But the fact is, this glorification of editors, of which I have been an extreme example, is not a wholesome thing. The editor's relationship to a book should be an invisible one.

Robert Gottlieb
When I was a young firebrand it never occurred to me that I might be wrong, or that I wasn't going to have my way, or that it wasn't my job to impose my views. I could get into twenty-minute shouting matches over semicolons, because every semicolon was a matter of life or death. As you grow older you realize that there are bad lines in King Lear and it has survived.

Robert Gottlieb
I happen to be a kind of word whore. I will read anything from Racine to a nurse romance, if it's a good nurse romance.

Robert Gottlieb