Linking to the Robert Gottlieb interview
in the Paris Review

This one is a Merry Solstice present to all the editors and writers out there in the world. It isn’t even really a post, it’s just a link and a bunch of quotes from a wonderful interview with one of the all-time great editors of our era, Robert Gottlieb—the Paris Review interview.

Read it. It’s gold.

Gottlieb on the state of contemporary publishing

The time I look back on as the golden age [postwar] was seen by people like Knopf as the age of slobs. . .When I was growing up in the business, editors, even if they were heads of publishing houses, tended to edit what they brought in. . .These days many editors don’t edit. Editors now basically make deals. Publishing has become far more complicated, fierce, and febrile.

Gottlieb on being an editor

I’ve never quite understood why people do what I say. But then, I’ve never taken myself very seriously. . .My impulse to make things good, good things better, is almost ungovernable. It’s lucky I found a wholesome outlet.

Gottlieb on editing

If you are a good editor, your relationship with every writer is different. . .When you deal with nonprofessional writers, you must give them tremendous encouragement simply to convince them they can write at all. . .I worked with one writer who wanted to call me up every day and read me what she had written. I discouraged her. . .An editor has to be selfless, and yet has also to be strong-minded. . .When I was a young firebrand, I could get into twenty-minute shouting matches over semicolons, every semicolon a matter of life or death. . .Your job as an editor is to figure out what the book needs, but the writer has to provide it.. . .Editors are the servants of the writers, and if we don’t serve writers well they leave us. . .The editor and the author have the same goal: to make the book as good as it can be.

Impoverished vocabulary disturbs me.

Author John LeCarre on Gottlieb and publishing

The speed with which books go on and off, shoot to the top of the best-seller list and are unheard of three months later, the market produces a much faster and more careless approach to the product itself. . .I don’t think writers need all that sympathy. They need to be told when their books are bad.

Author Doris Lessing on Gottlieb and publishing

Now [after Gottlieb’s era] it is common to meet editors who talk about a second-rate book as if it were best. Commercial pressure brought them low.

Author Michael Crichton on Gottlieb the editor

There is absolutely no question that I see Bob paternally. Absolutely no question. . .You lay on your tummy side-by-side with him on the floor of his office, and sandwiches were brought up. . .I’d send drafts that were not cleaned up enough, and he’d be a little short about being shown something that was not ready. . .There’s jealousy: you don’t want to walk in the office and see another writer chatting with your editor—you’d want to kill them. You learn to schedule your appointments so you can see Daddy all by yourself.

Author Bob Caro on Gottlieb the editor

All through our relationship we’ve had a tacit understanding that the words delivery date are never to be mentioned. . .We could spend a long time fighting over an adjective. We had such fights sometimes he’d bring in another editor as a buffer. . .Bob never said one nice thing to me—not a single word. Then he got soft. He lifted the manuscript and said slowly, as if he didn’t want to, Not bad.

New Yorker deputy editor Charles McGrath on Gottlieb the editor

He has a great nose for highfalutin crap of any sort. He goes at it like a terrier. It’s as if he can smell it.

Author Mordecai Richler on Gottlieb the editor

Asked about my film work, I had told Maclean’s magazine I used other muscles. Yes, said Bob, his sphincter.

Literary agent Lynn Nesbit on Gottlieb the editor

People always say Bob has such an enormous ego, but I say that Bob takes this enormous ego and lends it to the writer.

Author and editor Toni Morrison on Gottlieb and editing

Editing is almost maternal: you deliver nurturing and corrective, and the pleasure is in seeing that show without your fingerprints. . .Bob and I used to joke about our egos being so huge that they didn’t exist.

Author Cynthia Ozick on Gottlieb and editing

An editor is often a father figure, a mother figure, a kind of ministerial figure…a teacher—someone who has something to tell you.

Author Chaim Potok on Gottlieb and editing

There is a certainty, an ease, an assuredness in Bob, and when you’re a writer to have that in an editor is valuable indeed.

And now I’m going on vacation for the rest of the year (my clients already know this), and when I get back I expect you all to have not only read the Robert Gottlieb interview, but perused the Paris Review site for their other interviews with your favorite authors. . .because they are all brilliant, they are all fascinating, and they are all sheer balm to the writerly soul.

Happy Holidays, everyone—see you next year!