Quote of the Day (William Maxwell, on the Author-Editor Relationship)

“There are times when having an editor is like having a second wife. Who but a wife ever feels they know who you are and what you should do better than you do yourself? And then they have that annoying way of sometimes being right.”—New Yorker fiction editor-novelist William Maxwell (1908-2000), letter from January-February 1963 to Irish writer and friend Frank O’Connor, in The Happiness of Getting It Right: Letters of Frank O’Connor and William Maxwell, 1945-1966, edited by Michael Steinman (1996)

Quote of the Day (William Maxwell, on the “Major Deprivation” of Serious Writers)

“If you search in the background of any serious writer, it isn't very long before you come upon a major deprivation of one sort or another—which the writer through the exercise of imagination tries to overcome or compensate for, or even make not have happened."—Editor/novelist William Maxwell (1908-2000), quoted in Poets & Writers Magazine, May-June 1994