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A new edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations comes out every 10 years. Does it take you that long to update the old edition?
This just happened to come out 10 years after the last. It doesn't take 10 years to edit. Most of the material is standing material. My job with the new edition, and the one in '92, is to comb through the old stuff and see what can survive. There's a fair amount of trimming, but the Bible and Shakespeare quotes stay. In fact, both are enlarged. I can't remember the additions exactly, but there are two or three extra Bible quotations: one from Proverbs, the House of Mirth, and the Ishmael quote. There is the expanded Shakespeare sonnet following 9/11. It seemed particularly poignant and apt, about destruction and impermanence. And of the so-called older authors, we have considerably enhanced Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, and Edith Wharton. Taste changes. We're now beginning to recognize how brilliant Jane Austen and Wharton are. For a long time, Wharton was under some sort of shadow, the shadow of Henry James. Now we recognize her to be equal to, if not superior to James.
How can you tell if a contemporary quotation has taken root in popular culture, or if it's just an ephemeral sound bite?
The empirical test is to see which quotations people are using in speech or editorials. There's no telling how long something will last. In the preface, this book includes Clinton saying, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky." I don't claim that that will last as long as "to be or not to be," (I don't think it will), but it's an important quotation of our time.
You're in your 70's. How do you keep up with youth culture?
I try to keep up. I have three daughters. They're not children any more, but I also have six grandchildren ranging in age from 3 to 18, and they're an important source.
How do you choose what to replace? What's gone? Is this edition bigger than the last?
In the last edition we trimmed a lot, so there was less need for it in this edition. I have categories of what I edited out. A fair amount of it was anything sentimental, or reflecting some sort of high-sounding sentiment or idea. Anything that sounded like it came from a Chinese fortune cookie doesn't belong in this book, according to my taste. A lot of mid-19th Century material was eliminated last time. There was not as much combing this time. Alexander Pope was cut down somewhat last time. There appeared to us to be a disproportionate amount of space dedicated to Pope -a legacy of much earlier editions. I like Pope, but you just don't hear people on the street quoting him.
Do you think that popular culture moves at a faster rate these days?
Yes, it definitely moves at a faster rate, and with less of an impression, just because of the sheer volume of stuff that we're exposed to. This is one reason for the lack of material from TV in this book. People go to the movies. They're focused on the screen and dialogue and there are no interruptions. They remember and quote movie dialogue. That's not true of TV. They answer the telephone, they go to the bathroom. There is definitely an ephemeral quality to television.
Do you have an all-time favorite quotation?
This is the point at which my mind goes blank! Whenever one enters into conversation here in Cambridge or New York, People quote movies. We almost have a vocabulary of movie quotations. With other quotations in this book, I don't claim that the man or woman in the street knows them. I am taking the latitude I have as editor to construe the word "familiar" in an elastic way. Some quotations are familiar, others are familiar because of appearing in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations: it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. I've included the quotation by the scientists Watson and Crick on the authentication of the double helix. It signaled the beginning of a major advance in modern science. Of course, people don't go around quoting Watson and Crick, but we have included crucial, life-changing statements.
With your wife, Anne Bernays, you co-authored "Language of Names," in which you wrote: "Names penetrate the core of our being, and are a form of poetry, storytelling, magic, and compressed history." Could the same be said of quotations?
Yes, very much so. There have been sophisticated critics who claim that all poetry is a form of quotation. That's going too far. But quotations penetrate into your deepest sub-conscious. We use them without being aware of it. They pass into language. In the preface, I quote two common idioms, "In my mind's eye," and "all hell broke loose." Those are cliché now, but you can trace their first recorded use to Shakespeare and Milton.
This is your 2nd run as edition of Bartlett's. Is that unusual?
No, I think earlier editors did more than one edition. John Bartlett, the original editor in 1855, did seven or eight, I think.
Seem to have a lexical and semantic fascination. To what do you attribute this?
It's hard to say. These have been my enthusiasms since I was able to read and speak. It's been a matter of luck and endowment. It's just my disposition. Some people live by language, and I'm one of them.
Think you'll do a 3rd edition? Are you already preparing?
I have no idea. That would bring us up to 2012. I've no idea, there are other books I want to do. I'm not being coy with you, it's just that this summer and currently, I'm figuring out what to do next. A book project perhaps, and not an anthology. Meanwhile, a number of my other books are being reissued. Harper's are reissuing my biography of Whitman; and Simon & Schuster are doing a hardcover of the Twain book [which won the Pulitzer]. It's been actively in press since 1966. The difficulty of choosing Twain as your first book is that there is a vitality of personality that you don't find anywhere else. I write about the lives of writers, but the lives of writers are rarely interesting apart from their work. They sit down and write. That's not much of a life-story. Twain was different because he went out in world. He was a lecturer, performer, publisher, traveler. A great deal of Twain's life was spent not sitting at a table; he was documenting things out in the world.
You attracted criticism in the last edition for not being that generous with President Reagan (which you remedied in this new edition{hellip} he has 6 quotations)
I admit that I was carried away by prejudice. Mischievously, I did him dirt. This time, I stayed on the record. "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," — that was one of the greatest moments in Western history. Whether or not he coined the phrase or not is irrelevant.
Clinton also has 6, including his famous "what the definition of 'is' is" speech
A: The funny thing about Bill Clinton is that there is nothing presidential or statesmanlike about him. What's memorial comes from his spontaneous and colloquial comments, and his southernisms, like "I'll be with you 'til the last dog dies." That's wonderful! I miss Bill, and his big mouth.
Bush has only got 1 so far, but that may be due to timing — you added some quotations relevant to 9/11?
Yes, that was due to the timing.
You had stopped work on Bartlett's before 9/11, but added material after the event. It must have been difficult to pick memorable quotations as they were happening.
One of the quotations after 9/11 that just stopped the press was the EB White one. It gives you the chills it's so prophetic. That simply happened. I was not alone in recognizing the quotation suddenly. One or two other people mentioned it. It was absolutely obligatory to put it in book. But about 9/11, I didn't want to be overly exploitative. There was not a lot that was terribly memorial. There was lots of comment of course. The most relevant were not necessarily things said at the time, but the prophetic things of EB White, and the expanded version of the Shakespeare sonnet. Giuliani has two quotes. We wanted to be timely without being coarse.
Some of the new quotations include Harry Potter, Mother Teresa, and Maya Angelou. Why did you choose them?
Part of the exercise is keeping in touch with what's going on. In the interval of 10 years since the last edition, things have happened; the death of Princess Diana, for example. In this book, there are some essential quotations like Paul Celan, on the nature of the Holocaust. It's a major quotation of European culture. Celan has begun to be recognized over here only in the last decade. Frank McCourt is a new arrival, as is Cameron Crowe, a brilliant screenwriter ("Show me the money!"); there's the Silence of the Lambs quotation, "I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti." That was easy as people quote him all the time.
Do you feel any pressure at being what amounts to a cultural arbiter, relegating some quotations to oblivion while raising some other up into popular lexicon?
It's basically an anthology. An anthology reflects a particular taste and a particular editor. You can't claim a book like this is definitive.
There's definitely your mark on the book — Twain is allotted 3 ½ full pages. Is that a conscious decision? Did you shy away from an editorial voice, or did you embrace it?
Only implicitly. There's a statement by Henry Burrows that no matter what you read in a book, it's always the author talking. You can't help it. It's always personal."