Quotes

Quote 403 of 521

The final revisions were astounding. "Look at this," said a colleague,
an editor who greatly admired Bellow's novels but disliked him
personally. He was keeping an eye on the proofs of Mr. Sammler's
Planet during the brief summer absence of Bellow's then-editor, Aaron
Asher. He threw down on my desk a single long sheet from the second
chapter, with scrawled lines defacing a paragraph at the top and new
phrases and clauses sprouting at the end, all this in a clear,
decisive hand and bright black ink. "Just read that," he repeated.
"Read it! He took a perfect sentence, the bastard, and he made it even
better."

Editing Saul Bellow, by Elisabeth Sifton,
		   <cite>Slate</cite>, 2005-04-08
		   http://slate.com/id/2116502/

Tags: phrasesandclauses blackink asher proofs bastard colleague revisions sammler novels paragraph desk absence