The Forest for the Trees
Betsy Lerner
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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.”
“[I]t's the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul.”
“It was a miracle to me, this transformation of my acorns into an oak.”
“...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.”
“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.”
“But editors are still the world's readers. And thus the eyes of the world.”
“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.”
“No matter how many compromises were made along the way, no matter what happens in the future, a book is a thing to behold.”
“For the writer who truly loves language, a trip to the copy editor is like a week at a spa. You come out looking younger, trimmer, and standing straighter.”
“For most writers, reading is also a very intense experience; they don’t read so much as compete. The writer measure’s himself against every text he encounters, imagining he could do it better or wishing he had thought of it first. The natural writer would almost always rather be reading, writing, or alone, except of course when he needs to come up for air (that is, for subject matter, food, sex, love, attention). He may be a selfish son of a bitch, he may seem to care more about his work than about the people in his life, he may be a social misfit, a freak, or a smooth operator, 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. Indeed, the great paradox of the writer’s life is how much time he spends alone trying to connect with other people.”
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Book Keywords:
on-writing, reading, editing, writers-on-writing, writing-craft, writing, writers, books, editors
