Quotes from A. Scott Berg

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Great changes are coming. Great things are going to happen. I may not live to see them, but you will.

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.

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.

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

So what do you think it's all about? Life, I mean." [...] "To work hard", she said, "and to love someone". Then she paused. "And to have some fun", she added. "And if you're lucky, you keep your health...and somebody loves you back".

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.

Wilson insisted the time had come for "hyphenated" citizenship to end.

His administration's negotiations with Great Britain (on behalf of Canada) resulted in the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which protected hundreds of species at a moment when commercial interests threatened to destroy them. In environmental matters, Wilson's guiding principle was to preserve as much as possible while serving as many as possible.

That said, he diplomatically added that all the participating nations wanted to reassure France that "what she has just gone through never will occur again.

is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is fascism.

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.

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.

The true basis for friendships is a prejudice or two in common," Max liked to say.

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.

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.

Wilson introduced Daylight Saving Time to America, which created an extra hour of farm work every day

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.

By the '40s, Sam Goldwyn is a very serious man. By the '50s, he's the dean of American producers. To the end, he was Hollywood's gray eminence.

When most people think of Woodrow Wilson, they see a dour minister's son who never cracked a smile, where in fact he was a man of genuine joy and great sadness.