- George Konrad
Have a life lived instead of a career. Put yourself in the safekeeping of good taste. Lived freedom will compensate you for a few losses.... If you don't like the style of others, cultivate your own. Get to know the tricks of reproduction, be a self-publisher even in conversation, and then the joys of working can fill your days.
How apt that you should merely motion, saying nothing: for this land has not yet been given a name, certainly not a Latin one; it does not yet exist.- André Brink, An Instant in the Wind
The publishing trade shouldn't just be guarding against Google, but against itself, against its increasingly fainhearted conviction about its own necessity.- Roberto Calasso
Abdullah Sahab had an impish sense of humor and a hearty laugh, especially after a drink or two. He knew his whiskey. He famously ran an off license in South London for years before returning to Lahore. When somebody in the audience at the Karachi Literary Festival misunderstood the nature of the operation, asking him whether it was becoming for somebody of his stature to deliver liquor to clients, he responded, "I didn't go to them. They came to me."- HM Naqvi, in Scroll.in
One of the editors of the Enciclopedia Einaudi invited me one day to write the entry for 'body'. I told him I felt honoured and perplexed, and instinctively asked him who was going to be writing the entry for 'soul'. "There's no plan for such an entry," he immediately replied, as though I'd asked something improper. At that moment I realized we would never have seen eye to eye.- Roberto Calasso, The Art of the Publisher
In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition.- and other fascinating not-so-trivia from John McWhorter, in Aeon magazine
Ulysses is a copy-editor’s nightmare and a printer’s incepted Freddy Kruger in a copy-editor’s nightmare.- Josh Cook, in an column about the correction (or otherwise) of Joyce's 'typos'
Even the Grammarians, tho' their whole bufinefs and ufe be only to render the words of an Author intelligible, are ftrangely touch'd with the pride of doing fomething more than they ought.- Alexander Pope, in his preface to Homer's Iliad
