Betsy Lerner

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 hadn't been able to trust since the age of four. I was torn between wanting to be cradled and telling the world to go fuck itself, and those were opposite sides of the same coin.

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

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change. The courage to change the things I can. And the wisdom to know the difference. I still didn't know the difference.

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

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.

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.

[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.

Nothing was a more powerful compass of my mood or a better indication of my self-worth than the number on the scale.

I had officially joined the cacophony of sick mother fuckers.