Lorin Stein Quotes

#1. I don't think much about the issues after they come out. I like it when people like them. Often, when people have criticisms, I find myself agreeing with them. I think some issues are stronger than others. I hope we're getting a little bit better, overall, issue by issue.

Lorin Stein

#2. I'm a reader who uses fiction as a way of worrying about life.

Lorin Stein

#3. You can go back and try to generalize, but then you end up saying things that all editors say about everything that ever gets published. Something about voice, about urgency, about actually having a story to tell.

Lorin Stein

#4. So, short stories have an even harder time, because they tend to get read during the day, between other things. They're interstitial. And yet the content of short stories tends to be very much "nighttime" content.

Lorin Stein

#5. I love having people around who are better interviewers than I am and who can make the time to do a really great job. All of the interviews that we've published are with people who really interest me.

Lorin Stein

#6. I like fiction that deals with matters that are of burning importance to us in our private lives. And not all short stories are like that. In general, short stories - and maybe this is a little bit off-topic - but I think short stories have this bad association with, like, waiting rooms.

Lorin Stein

#7. I don't know what people should be reading. Only you know what you should be reading.

Lorin Stein

#8. Names don't matter, CVs don't matter, previous publications don't matter at all, because, in a certain way, the ideal is for someone to come completely out of left field. And still, of course, it is hard to say no to a writer who matters a lot to you and who you know matters to your readers.

Lorin Stein

#9. For me the question that you have to ask, about any magazine, is whether it's needed, whether it's publishing things that no one else could publish, or publish equally well. So there's that.

Lorin Stein

#10. If you wrote about sex the way Jim [Salter] writes about sex in nonfiction, you would be a sociopath.

Lorin Stein

#11. I've never thought that it made sense to put something out that I didn't actually find really fun to read. Or, if not "fun," engaging. My tastes are whatever they are, but I may be a little bit afraid of certain kinds of density. I may get turned off by certain kinds of show-offyness.

Lorin Stein

#12. The real threat to reading isn't the time we spend hanging out, it's the time we spend online.

Lorin Stein

#13. I tend to think that the onus is on the writer to engage the reader, that the reader should not be expected to need the writer, that the writer has to prove it. All that stuff might add up to a kind of fun in the work. I like things that are about interesting subjects, which sounds self-evident.

Lorin Stein

#14. In general, short stories are less read than before, they're less published than before and, not surprisingly, they're less taught than before.

Lorin Stein

#15. We've never had a giant circulation. And we've always been a magazine for writers and for sophisticated readers. We've never had to run stories that would appeal to a million people. And what you end up with is a kind of tradition that might have staying power - the cockroach after armageddon.

Lorin Stein

#16. Nowadays, even The New York Times Book Review is afraid to say when a popular book is crap.

Lorin Stein