Keith Gessen QUOTES

1 " One changes, as a writer, fairly quickly; what you wrote six months or a year ago might not sound right anymore. "

2 " We hurt one another. We go through life dressing up in new clothes and covering up our true motives. We meet up lightly, we drink rosé wine, and then we give each other pain. We don't want to! What we want to do, what one really wants to do is put out one's hands—like some dancer, in a trance, just put out one's hands—and touch all the people and tell them: I'm sorry. I love you. Thank you for your e-mail. Thank you for coming to see me. Thank you. But we can't. We can't. On the little life raft of Mark only one other person could fit. Just one! And so, thwarted, we inflict pain. That’s what we do. We do not keep each other company. We do not send each other cute text messages. Or, rather, when we do these things, we do them merely to postpone the moment when we'll push these people off, and beat forward, beat forward on our little raft, alone. "

― Keith Gessen , All the Sad Young Literary Men

3 " You had to be fundamentally stupid, I sometimes thought, to become the sort of academic specialist that hiring committees liked. You had to be thick somehow. You had to block out all the other things in the world to focus on one narrow, particular thing. "

― Keith Gessen , A Terrible Country

4 " Our grandmother lived in the center of Moscow. The rents there were almost as high as Manhattan's. On my PMOOC salary I would be able to rent approximately an armchair. "

― Keith Gessen , A Terrible Country

5 " Honestly,” he says, “I judge writers on how they write queries. If you’re a good writer, you’re a good writer.” And if not, then not. "

― Keith Gessen

6 " She had such control of tone, in her text messages, she was the Edith Wharton of text messaging. "

― Keith Gessen , All the Sad Young Literary Men

7 " To cook and clean yourself is intolerable. But to have someone else do it is exhausting. "

― Keith Gessen , A Terrible Country

8 " The sanatorium itself was charming, a group of cabins in the woods, a place for overworked urbanites to feel pleasantly melancholic. A slackertorium. "

― Keith Gessen , All the Sad Young Literary Men

9 " He was getting to be a certain age, he thought. It was the age when his never-to-be-written masterpieces had begun to outweigh the masterpieces he was still going to write. "

― Keith Gessen , All the Sad Young Literary Men

10 " Fame—fame was the anti-death. But it seemed to slither from his grasp, seemed to giggle and retreat, seemed to hide behind a huge oak tree and make farting sounds with its hands. "

― Keith Gessen , All the Sad Young Literary Men

11 " And so in addition to lots of reading, the life of an editor involves constantly trying to get others to read as well. "

― Keith Gessen , Vanity Fair's How a Book is Born: The Making of The Art of Fielding

12 " You say that like she edited Ulysses,” I said. “I don’t care!” said my friend. “It was a No. 1 best-seller!” VII. "

― Keith Gessen , Vanity Fair's How a Book is Born: The Making of The Art of Fielding