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1 " Don’t give me that Christian forgiveness bullshit, Dukach. I’m a vindictive Jew!” he’d bellow. "
― Jonathan Galassi , Muse
2 " This is a love story. It’s about the good old days, when men were men and women were women and books were books. "
3 " In 90 percent of cases, you could tell within a page or two whether the writer could write. "
4 " Publishing would be so wonderful without those wretched authors. "
5 " It was the artists who finally gave their times and places significance. Paul felt the presence of their ghosts out in the world, just as felt them in his office and in his head. The air was full of them. They were everywhere and always would be. "
6 " They’d all chatted cordially about the weather, their children, and various authors, steering clear, for the most part, of the ones they’d ‘shared’ (i.e. fought over) and moving on to the general decline of the business and the perfidy of agents – subjects the two old lions were in utter agreement about. "
7 " Out with the old; in with the aftermath. "
8 " It didn’t matter what you said as long as you were quoted. "
9 " Love in the flesh remained elusive. It drew yet frightened him. This was the late eighties, after all, the most terrifying days of the plague. Surrounded everywhere by insolent youth and beauty, Paul looked and lusted but didn’t dare touch. "
10 " Being in love is arguably the least productive of human states. "
11 " He’d come to appreciate that writers were just like everyone else, except when they were more so. It sometimes seemed that they’d been able to develop their gifts thanks to a lack of inhibition, an inner permission to feel and react, that made them seem self-absorbed and insensitive to the existence of anyone else. "
12 " Paul believed in believers—not the credulous religious, but those who aspired to move the needle, to add something to the world. "
13 " her “lifelong need to seem normal. "
14 " It was one of the realities of publishing: what was truly new often languished in the warehouse nearly unasked-for. One of the tricks of publishing was catching the wave of public taste at the right moment. "
15 " Most of the smaller houses had been gobbled up by so-called general-interest publishers, most of them now owned in turn by much bigger conglomerates who’d publish anything they could get their hands on that had a chance of making money. "
16 " The charred smell came, he assumed, from the pages themselves, burning away invisibly as they had for years in the Impetus vault in New York. Eventually they would crumble and be lost to the world, if they weren’t thrown away first. For today, though, they were his to inhale and get lost in. "
17 " For all his profanity and bedroom antics, though, Homer was a relative prude when it came to misbehaving on the page. "
18 " The literary publishers were the Lords of Culture, the master parasites sitting on top of this swarming dunghill. "
19 " Venice was a hallucinatory incubus, the most artificial environment in the world: Disneyland for grown-ups. It reeked of sex and its putrescent partner, death. Thomas Mann had caught its rouged, feverish aura perfectly. "
20 " You’re not one of those despicable literary sleuths who think he can deduce every last little sordid biographical detail from a writer’s work, are you? "
