Manuscript Of Quotes

#1. I've always tried out my material on my dogs first. Years ago, when my red setter chewed up the manuscript of 'Of Mice and Men,' I said at the time that the dog must have been an excellent literary critic.

John Steinbeck

#2. This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don't consider it rejected. Consider that you've addressed it 'to the editor who can appreciate my work' and it has simply come back stamped 'Not at this address'. Just keep looking for the right address.

Barbara Kingsolver

#3. Within, there were several ponderous brazen-bound volumes of medieval date, a thin manuscript of yellowing parchment, and two portraits whose faces had been turned to the wall, as if it were unlawful for even the darkness of the sealed closet to behold them.

Clark Ashton Smith

#4. It is not as easy to emigrate with steel mills as it is with the manuscript of a novel.

Golo Mann

#5. Hall nodded as he skimmed the manuscript of Gaines' upcoming book, The Future of the Past.

Brandt Legg

#6. This was a manuscript of the night we couldn't read.

Jack Kerouac

#7. A novelist can never be his own reader, except when he is ridding his manuscript of syntax errors, repetitions, or the occasional superfluous paragraph.

Patrick Modiano

#8. Tolstoy's wife copied out the entire manuscript of War and Peace in longhand seven times.

David Markson

#9. When I was taken to the concentration camp of Auschwitz, a manuscript of mine ready for publication was confiscated. Certainly, my deep desire to write this manuscript anew helped me to survive the rigors of the camps I was in.

Viktor E. Frankl

#10. It was a few minutes before Helena could stop panting. She dared not read any further, or she'd crash through the connecting door and ravish Hastings - and she was far from sure how she felt about him.
As she was reading the manuscript of The Bride of Larkspear

Sherry Thomas

#11. Write a lot. And finish what you write. Don't join writer's clubs and go sit around having coffee reading pieces of your manuscript to people. Write it. Finish it. I set those rules up years ago, and nothing's changed.

Jerry Pournelle

#12. A good deal of editing a manuscript looks like mechanical work, as if anyone with time on their hands and a magnifying glass could do it. But at a certain point, you need a strong interpretive conviction and, as you say, an "intangible" relationship to what you are doing.

Oliver Harris

#13. The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.

Umberto Eco

#14. Here he produced two immense folded packets, which appeared each to contain a whole ream of closely written manuscript. They had been the labour of the worthy man's whole life; and never were labour and zeal more absurdly wasted.

Walter Scott

#15. In A Life In Books, author and graphic design visionary Warren Lehrer crafts a vivid kaleidoscopic odyssey that frames one man's life through not one, but one hundred different books - and book jackets ... An unmistakably modern evocation of the illuminated manuscript.

Jessica Helfand

#16. [I]n the long run it's worthwhile to see the manuscript as a text capable of improvement.

Barbara Sjoholm

#17. It was in a stonecutter's house where I went to have a headstone made for Raftery's grave that I found a manuscript book of his poems, written out in the clear beautiful Irish characters.

Lady Gregory

#18. When you print out your manuscript and read it, marking up with a pen, it sometimes feels like a criminal returning to the scene of a crime.

Don Roff

#19. If you're one of the hundreds of thousands of people out there toiling over your unpublished manuscript, trying to make your way across that vast ocean in a bathtub, I can only say this to you: keep paddling. Well, either that or start vlogging.

John Niven

#20. I read the novel I had been writing for several months with an odd sense that it was the work of a stranger. I usually work in the dead hours of night and surprising the manuscript mid-morning revealed the flaws and excesses it was trying to conceal.

Chloe Thurlow

#21. Leaving him was less like leaving even the most simple of her friends in Flaw Valleys, and more like losing unfinished a manuscript, beautiful, absorbing and difficult, which she had long wanted to read.

Dorothy Dunnett

#22. As I say, all all he wanted from the manuscript was the string. That was the way he was. Nobody could predict what he was going to be interested in next. On the day of the bomb it was string. [ ... ] He had no use at all for tricks and games and rules that other people made up.

Kurt Vonnegut

#23. Often I sort of work up and down the manuscript. I sometimes used to go ahead of myself to see what was going to happen next, to make certain it fits what was going to be happening soon.

Terry Pratchett

#24. At the age of six, Mahler accepted paid commissions as a composer, something he was never to do in later life, his mother having promised him two kreuzers on condition that he did not make any ink blots on the expensive music manuscript paper.

Jens Malte Fischer

#25. Good designers are no longer satisfied in taking the manuscript from someone and making it look nice. One of the things that I've tried to do is move from being a designer to a content provider.

Tibor Kalman

#26. When the adversaries of Erasmus had got the Trinity into his edition, they threw by their manuscript as an old almanac out of date.

Isaac Newton

#27. No one would have the courage to walk up to a writer and ask to look at the last few pages of his manuscript, but they feel perfectly comfortable staring over an artist's shoulder while he is trying to paint.

Robert Genn

#28. If we are perplexed by an apparent contradiction in Scripture, it is not allowable to say, 'The author of this book is mistaken'; but either the manuscript is faulty, or the translation is wrong, or you have not understood.

Saint Augustine

#29. A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.

Ring Lardner

#30. Fundamentally a good author has his or her own sense of style. There is a natural, deep voice, and that voice is present from the first draft of a manuscript. When he or she elaborates on the initial manuscript, it continues to strengthen and simplify that natural, deep voice.

Kenzaburo Oe

#31. The best young writers are convinced they need blurbs from famous writers before an editor will even read the first page of a manuscript. If this is true, then the editorial system that prevails today stinks. And let's start reforming it.

Diane Wakoski

#32. As an editor, I read Charlotte Rogan's amazing debut novel, 'The Lifeboat,' when it was still in manuscript. I read it in one night, and I really wanted my company to publish it, but we lost it to another house. It's such a wonderful combination of beautiful writing and suspenseful storytelling.

Karen Thompson Walker

#33. I came to a dead stop and began major revisions. Sometimes these entailed the shredding of all existing manuscript for a fresh start - an inefficient way to write a book, though I found it exciting.

William Manchester

#34. - And I won't deny your neighbors will take you more seriously if you tell them you've written a novel. (Of course if that's the main concern, just go and tell them. You don't have to write anything. Just lie a little. Don't worry - they won't beg to read the manuscript.)

Lawrence Block

#35. It is difficult for me to commit to an manuscript. Once, I get finished writing it. I get this feeling of adrenaline, and satisfaction. This is when the amusement begins, for the writer's side of me.

Mary Sage Nguyen

#36. I love all of my children equally, all of my printed books, and each one bears a special piece of me. But the one I'm most proud of is the one no one will ever see - the very first manuscript I ever wrote, back in 1990. It took me a year to do it.

Steve Berry

#37. There is great exhilaration in breaking one of these things ... Ramanujan gives no hints, no proof of his formulas, so everything you do you feel is your own.[About verifying Ramanujan's equations in a newly found manuscript.]

George Andrews

#38. It was not uncommon to walk in the door of their home and find my mother sitting on the sofa reading over a manuscript with shampoo horns sculpted into her hair. Anne Sexton's voice would be blasting from the speakers. A woman who writes feels too much ...

Augusten Burroughs

#39. I think the trick of writing a good picture book manuscript is to leave that space for illustration. An illustrated novel can do the same thing.

Mac Barnett

#40. The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case, He turns his quid of tobacco, while his eyes blur with the manuscript.

Walt Whitman

#41. I outline fairly extensively because I'm usually dealing with real events. I don't need to give myself as much information as I used to, but I still like to have two pages of outline for every projected 100 pages of manuscript.

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

#42. Edit your manuscript until your fingers bleed and you have memorized every last word. Then, when you are certain you are on the verge of insanity ... edit one more time!

C.K. Webb

#43. Forty minutes later, I leaned back in my chair, and looked at the thousand or so pages of manuscript towering on my desk. It hit me. Holy cow. This author had total control over this book. Total. And it was one of seven. One. Of. Seven.

Carla Bolte

#44. It started out as a typically insane idea to map every part of the published text in terms of its manuscript provenance and history, and to establish the cultural meaning of the book, part and whole.

Oliver Harris

#45. Thanks to Karen Connelly who read earlier versions of this manuscript and to Ronald Hatch my editor and publisher.

Nancy Holmes

#46. If you want to send a manuscript, send it to an agent. And send a letter first, asking permission. Launch it into the real world of cold-blooded commercial response, not into the fantasyland of wishful thinking, cowardice and surrender to Resistance.

Steven Pressfield

#47. These letters, and then words, and then sentences, that are written on your manuscript are all answers to questions. Writing is nothing but a long journey of confronting questions. Accomplishment will bring you peace, but will not make a writer of you.

Rabisankar Bal

#48. The potential biographies of those who die young possess the mystic dignity of a headless statue, the poetry of enigmatic passages in an unfinished or mutilated manuscript, unburdened with contrived or banal endings.

Anthony Powell

#49. You should be writing for the love of the story, and when it comes time to return to the manuscript, everything else belongs behind a closed door.

Michael Koryta

#50. Remember, it is no sign of weakness or defeat that your manuscript ends up in need of major surgery. This is a common occurrence in all writing, and among the best writers.

William Strunk Jr.

#51. Far from resenting these lessons, the pupil, to please his tutor, once composed a sheaf of poems, and though the verses were very obscene, Perry, who thought them nevertheless hilarious, had had the manuscript leather-bound in a prison shop and its title, Dirty Jokes, stamped in gold.

Truman Capote

#52. I starved and slept on park benches. I wrapped myself in the pages of my manuscript to keep warm. For two and a half years I took odd jobs; nothing was going to deter me.

Gary Jennings

#53. If you get into the habit of using the Heading 1 style for your manuscript Chapters, you won't have to manually correct all the

Suzanne Fyhrie Parrott

#54. Literary Agent: "I meant manuscript wise."
Tina: "Ohh. Um, yes. I've brought a few with me, just some rough drafts. (shuffle, shuffle) You might say something of an experiment.

Christina Engela

#55. An unedited manuscript is a first draft of story; but is not a finished product. Too many writers study the craft of writing but do not acquire the skills of an editor.

Michael J. Kannengieser

#56. When you start writing a picture book, you have to write a manuscript that has enough language to prompt the illustrator to get his or her gears running, but then you end up having to cut it out because you don't want any of the language to be redundant to the pictures that are being drawn.

Daniel Handler

#57. I became a connoisseur of that nasty thud a manuscript makes when it comes through the letter box.

James Herriot

#58. Only Southerners have taken horsewhips and pistols to editors about the treatment or maltreatment of their manuscript. This
the actual pistols
was in the old days, of course, we no longer succumb to the impulse. But it is still there, within us.

William Faulkner

#59. Be wary of cutting and pasting research nuggets directly into your manuscript.

Gayle Lynds

#60. I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels ... a Library of Congress worth of awful literature.

Seth Grahame-Smith

#61. Who would sup with the mighty must climb the path of daggers.

-Anonymous notation found inked in the margin of a manuscript history (believed to date to the time of Arthur Hawkwing) of the last days of the Tovan Conclaves

Robert Jordan

#62. Creativity runs across many categories in life, from the arts-and-crafts project a mum or dad does with their kids, to the bestselling author's manuscript, to the designs of the hairdresser, to the creations of the computer programming genius.

Tabatha Coffey

#63. I always feel trepidation at the beginning of every project. I worry about so many things. Time to get it right, the skill to do it justice, the will to finish. I also worry about more mundane things, like what if my computer crashes and I've forgotten to back up the manuscript?

Rick Yancey

#64. Well, certainly the Voynich Manuscript is the 'limit text' of Western occultism. No one can read it. It is truly an occult book.

Terence McKenna

#65. As a writer, you have control of the words you put on the page. But once that manuscript leaves your hand, you give control to the reader. As a director, you are limited by everything: weather, budget, and egos.

Nicholas Meyer

#66. When you write a manuscript, it feels like being in a relationship with someone. You'll hate it, get bored with it, be pissed of, like you just want to break up. But, just like any relationship, you will fall in love again and again, like you don't want to lose it.

Alvi Syahrin

#67. Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it - wholeheartedly - and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

Steven Pinker

#68. When I finished graduate school, I had a master's of fine arts from a prestigious institution, a manuscript that would eventually become my first published book - and almost no marketable skills.

Victor LaValle

#69. When I was growing up the publishing world seemed so far away. When my mother wrote a book, she would look up the address of publishers on the backs of the books she owned and send off her manuscript.

Kiran Desai

#70. If a publisher declines your manuscript, remember it is merely the decision of one fallible human being, and try another.

Stanley Unwin

#71. Destroy your manuscript, but save whatever you have inscribed in the margin out of boredom, out of helplessness, and, as it were, in a dream. (The Egyptian Stamp)

Osip Mandelstam

#72. I have a color-coded computer spreadsheet that divides things down to chapter fragments. Each character's point-of-view is a different color. The text of the manuscript is color-coded the same way. The last thing I do before submitting the manuscript is turn all those colors back to black.

Neal Shusterman

#73. Thus there are two books from whence I collect my Divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his servant Nature, that universal and public Manuscript, that lies expans'd unto the eyes of all; those that never saw him in the one, have discovered him in the other.

Thomas Browne

#74. Instead of taking a year off, I started 'Dreamers of the Day' exactly 36 hours after I sent the manuscript for 'A Thread of Grace' to the publisher!

Mary Doria Russell

#75. I do believe you would be perfectly happy shut up in your study with your rolls of manuscript all your life, without seeing another human being save a servant to bring you in bread and fruit and water twice a day.

G.A. Henty

#76. It can be depressing when no one takes interest, and a lack of response makes the writer question why they're writing at all. To have one's writing rejected is like you, yourself, are being rejected.

Elizabeth Clements

#77. Talking to Lee Child and discovering, from his chapter in The Chopin Manuscript, that he's even more of an audio geek than I am (as his chapter in Chopin proves).

David Hewson

#78. I am completing a book I began back in 2002 called 'Poems in the Manner of.' 'The Matador of Metaphor' is from this manuscript. It is an homage to Wallace Stevens that appropriates certain of his techniques.

David Lehman

#79. Self-pity needed her full attention, and only in solitude could she breathe life into the lacerating details, but at the instant of her assent - how the tilt of a skull could change a life! - Lola had picked up the bundle of Briony's manuscript from

Ian McEwan

#80. I ran through the manuscript in the space of a day, much as one might pick compulsively at a box of chocolates. It was simply too provocative to put down. Has the potential of being highly influential inside the field and among an informed public.

Baruch Halpern

#81. Books can now be on the stands within days from delivery of a formatted manuscript, and often are.

Bruce Jackson

#82. What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish.

Thomas Wolfe

#83. But, as all scientists know, there is a time lag of 12 to 18 months between the time a manuscript is submitted and the time it is published in a scientific journal.

Paul Harvey

#84. I think we are waiting for an e-book that even non-techies can be comfortable with. From my point of view, the biggest change is that I don't have to spend most of the day printing out and packaging a manuscript. I think I almost miss that.

Terry Pratchett

#85. The Rift, which was well over a thousand pages of manuscript, took two years.

Walter Jon Williams

#86. The manuscript may go forth from the writer to return with a faithfulness passing the faithfulness of the boomerang or the homing pigeon.

Rose Macaulay

#87. The key to all mysteries and the source of all Illumination lies deep within the self. ROSICRUCIAN MANUSCRIPT

Harvey Spencer Lewis

#88. Rob left a note in the Manuscript, stating that once the formula was perceived and defined, it could be used in many ways, including winning millions of dollars from a bunch of billionaires.

J.M.K. Walkow

#89. You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.

Isaac Asimov

#90. I wanted to write; I sought all possible paths of personal liberation, but I could never sacrifice a living instant of life for the sake of a line to be written, my balance for the sake of a manuscript, a storm within me for the sake of a poem. I loved life itself too much for this.

Nina Berberova

#91. One of my graduate school professors, to whom I started sending poems when I started writing again after a 10-year hiatus, suggested I prepare a book manuscript which he could send to publishers for me.

Marilyn Nelson

#92. I love my editor, but that would be the definition of hell to me to live with someone and have them go page by page through my manuscript. That I want to avoid at all costs.

Dean Koontz

#93. Transforms old print To zigzag manuscript, and cheats the eyes Of gallery critics by a thousand arts.

William Cowper

#94. We had spent years battling for control of our marriage, of our love story, our life story. I had been thoroughly, finally outplayed. I created a manuscript, and she created a life.

Gillian Flynn

#95. To visit Morocco is still like turning the pages of some illuminated Persian manuscript all embroidered with bright shapes and subtle lines.

Edith Wharton

#96. To me, all the juice of a book is in an unpublished manuscript, and the published book is like a dead tree - just good for cutting up and building your house with.

Christina Stead

#97. But what ultimately made Yates the scourge of copy editors was his simple aversion to criticism; any emendation in his manuscript, be it a single semicolon, would cause dark alcoholic brooding, which would finally erupt in long, hectoring, semicoherent phone calls.

Blake Bailey

#98. I wanted to write something visual that I could read to the children. This was when I created the idea of Redwall Abbey in my imagination. As I wrote, the idea grew, and the manuscript along with it.

Brian Jacques

#99. Grateful love and thanks. And last but not least to my elder son, David, for his careful preparation of the final manuscript.

Marion Zimmer Bradley

#100. The pain of an unpublished manuscript is akin to the trauma of bearing an unborn.

Anurag Shourie