Betsy Lerner 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.

  Betsy Lerner

  Sex, Revenge, Book

  Betsy Lerner (2016). “The Forest for the Trees: An editor's advice to writers”, p.61, Pan Macmillan

  45 Copy quote

• 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.

  Betsy Lerner

  Writing, Pages, World

  Betsy Lerner (2016). “The Forest for the Trees: An editor's advice to writers”, p.21, Pan Macmillan

  44 Copy quote

• Fear of failure is the reason most often cited to explain why so many aspiring writers never realize their dreams. But I think it’s that same fear of failure that absolutely invigorates those who do push through-that is, the fear of not being heard.

  Betsy Lerner

  Dream, Thinking, Realizing

  Betsy Lerner (2016). “The Forest for the Trees: An editor's advice to writers”, p.13, Pan Macmillan

  5 Copy quote

• 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….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…. Your job is to marshal the talent you do have and find people who believe in your work. What’s important, finally, is that you create, and that those creations define for you what matters most, that which cannot be extinguished even in the face of silence, solitude, and rejection.

  Betsy Lerner

  Jobs, Believe, Writing

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Betsy Lerner

  Believe, Writing, Blue

  Betsy Lerner (2010). “The Forest for the Trees (Revised and Updated): An Editor's Advice to Writers”, p.19, Penguin

  5 Copy quote

• Tomorrow, I am fifty-two years old. And I want to say unequivocally that I am very happy to be alive, that being alive is better than being dead. And if I have just one wish it is this: that you work with all your might and love with all your heart and never lose hope and never give up.

  Betsy Lerner

  Giving Up, Heart, Years

  12 Copy quote

• I wondered if I was just the sum of my brain scan, little dots clustered in my frontal lobe. Is that where the poems came from? The desire to destroy myself? This last depression had scared me. It had come on so quickly, not like the gradual woolgathering in my brain I had known before.

  Betsy Lerner

  Depression, Brain, Desire

  Betsy Lerner (2004). “Food and Loathing: A Life Measured Out in Calories”, p.281, Simon and Schuster

  8 Copy quote

• Asking for advice about what you should write is a little like asking for help getting dressed. I can you tell you what I think looks good, but you have to wear it. And as every fashion victim knows, very few people look good in everything.

  Betsy Lerner

  Fashion, Writing, Thinking

  Betsy Lerner (2016). “The Forest for the Trees: An editor's advice to writers”, p.11, Pan Macmillan

  5 Copy quote

• The writer labors in isolation, yet all that intensive, lonely work is in the service of communicating, is an attempt to reach another person.

  Betsy Lerner

  Lonely, Isolation, Communicate

  Betsy Lerner (2016). “The Forest for the Trees: An editor's advice to writers”, p.6, Pan Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

• Indeed, the great paradox of the writer's life is how much time he spends alone trying to connect with other people.

  Betsy Lerner

  People, Trying, Life Is

  Betsy Lerner (2016). “The Forest for the Trees: An editor's advice to writers”, p.21, Pan Macmillan

  5 Copy quote

• In discovering books, you became free to explore the full range of human motives, desires, secrets, and lies. All my life, people have scolded me for having an excess of feeling, saying that I was too sensitive - as if one could be in danger from feeling too much instead of too little. But my outsize emotions were well represented in books. [] there simmered all the feelings no one ever admits to.

  Betsy Lerner

  Lying, Book, People

  Betsy Lerner (2016). “The Forest for the Trees: An editor's advice to writers”, p.15, Pan Macmillan

  5 Copy quote

• No matter how many compromises were made along the way, no matter what happens in the future, a book is a thing to behold.

  Betsy Lerner

  Book, Matter, Way

  Betsy Lerner (2016). “The Forest for the Trees: An editor's advice to writers”, p.136, Pan Macmillan

  5 Copy quote

• But editors are still the world's readers. And thus the eyes of the world.

  Betsy Lerner

  Eye, Editors, World

  Betsy Lerner (2010). “The Forest for the Trees (Revised and Updated): An Editor's Advice to Writers”, p.122, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

• I wondered if I was just the sum of my brain scan, little dots clustered in my frontal lobe. Is that where the poems came from?.

  Betsy Lerner

  Brain, Littles, Dots

  Betsy Lerner (2004). “Food and Loathing: A Life Measured Out in Calories”, p.281, Simon and Schuster

  5 Copy quote

• ... 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.

  Betsy Lerner

  Writing, Doe, World

  Betsy Lerner (2016). “The Forest for the Trees: An editor's advice to writers”, p.21, Pan Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

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