In addition to the passage I shared earlier this week from one of Vladimir Nabokov’s letters in which he dissed poets who are less than serious about their art, here’s another quote that I copied out long ago.

His target in this letter? Editors!

It is the principle of editing itself which distresses me.

I shall be very grateful to you if you help me to weed out bad grammar, but I do not think I would like my longish sentences clipped too close, or have those drawbridges lowered which I have taken such pains to lift. In other words, I would like to discriminate between awkward construction (which is bad) and a certain special—how shall I put it—sinuosity, which is my own and which only at first glance may seem awkward or obscure. Why not have the reader re-read a sentence now and then? It won’t hurt him.

Let’s hear it for sinuosity!