Max Perkins Quotes

“Max said little. His essential quality was always to say little, but by powerful empathy for writers and for books to draw out of them what they had it in them to say and to write.”
― A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

“Another Brownell adage that Perkins subscribed to was that the worst reason for publishing anything was that it resembled something else, that however unconscious, "an imitation is always inferior.”
― A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

“There’s a good feeling about them. It’s something I like to find in fiction. So many writers master form and technique, but get so little feeling into their work. I think that’s important.”
― A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

“Max sent Scottie some literary advice, the same dictum he gave every college student who called on him. He stressed the importance of a liberal arts education but urged her to avoid all courses in writing. "Everyone has to find her own way of writing," he wrote Scottie, "and the source of finding it is largely out of literature.”
― A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

“Publishing is not, of course, dependent on the individual taste of the publisher,” Perkins replied to one reader of Hemingway’s novel. “He is under an obligation to his profession which binds him to bring out a work which in the judgment of the literary world is significant in its literary qualities and is a pertinent criticism of the civilization of the time.”
― A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

“He stressed the importance of a liberal arts education but urged her to avoid all courses in writing. “Everyone has to find her own way of writing,” he wrote Scottie, “and the source of finding it is largely out of literature.” Scottie”
― A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

“There is no doubt that Hemingway has sacrificed thousands in his sales by the use of what we have come to call the ‘four letter words’ and I do not think he need have done it. The truth is that words that are objected to have a suggestive power for the reader which is quite other than that which they have to those who use them; and therefore they are not right artistically. They should have exactly that meaning and implication which they have when uttered. But they have an altogether different one when they strike unaccustomed ears and eyes.”
― A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

“the tart values of New England were the essence of his character. He was full of Yankee quirks and biases. He could be crotchety in his behavior and literary taste, obtuse and old-fashioned. And yet, Brooks believed, Windsor and all it stood for had kept him at heart ”so direct, so uninfluenced by prejudice, so unclouded by secondary feelings, so immediate, so fresh.“ Max’s was a New England mind, filled with dichotomies.”
― A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

“My feeling,” he explained, “is that a publisher’s first allegiance is to talent. And if we aren’t going to publish a talent like this, it is a very serious thing.” He contended that the ambitious Fitzgerald would be able to find another publisher for this novel and young authors would follow him: “Then we might as well go out of business.”
― A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

“The true basis for friendships is a prejudice or two in common,” Max liked to say.”
― A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

“Por entonces, en octubre de 1902, el padre de Max, que obstinadamente desaprobaba el uso de abrigos, cogió una pulmonía. Murió tres días, después, a los cuarenta y cuatro años.”
― A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

“To my mind, college is the place to expand, to overcome prejudices, to look at things through one’s own eyes. Here the boy first stands upon his own feet. Hitherto he has been in the hands of others to mould, now he must mould himself. He must cut loose from old ideas.”
― A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

“Perkins’s first piece of advice came from Hemingway, the only survivor of his great triumvirate of the twenties: “Always stop while you are going good. Then when you resume you have the impetus of feeling that what you last did was good. Don’t wait until you are baffled and stumped.”
― A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

“One did not have to sell like Hemingway, Davenport, Hale, Rawlings, Weston, or Taylor Caldwell to get Perkins’s backing. In fact, his heart went out most readily to the person who desperately desired to be a writer but who could not produce a good book.”
― A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

“Martha Gellhorn joined Hemingway in Madrid one month later. After six weeks in Spain, Ernest left, picked up the manuscript of his novel in Paris, and went to Bimini to revise it. There he was reunited with his children and Pauline. A few weeks later he came to New York again to deliver a speech before the Second American Writers’ Congress at Carnegie Hall. Martha sat by his side during the speeches that preceded his. Her influence perhaps explained a new political tone that his speech displayed. “Really good writers are always rewarded under almost any existing system of government that they can tolerate,” he said before the writers’ congress. “There is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is fascism. For fascism is a lie told by bullies. A writer who will not lie cannot live and work under fascism.” While”
― A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

“is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is fascism.”
― A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

“Before Perkins nobody at Scribners had edited so boldly or closely as he did Fitzgerald, and some of the older editors considered the practice questionable. They liked Max and sensed his ability, but they did not always understand him. In small ways as well as large, Max was different.”
― A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

“To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing: to lose the life you have, for greater life: to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving, to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth— —Whereon the pillars of this earth are founded, toward which the conscience of the world is tending—a wind is rising, and the rivers flow.”
― A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius