Top 96 Quotes About Manuscripts
#1. When I get sent manuscripts from aspiring poets, I do one of two things: if there is no stamped self-addressed envelope, I throw it into the bin.-If there is, I write and tell them to f**k off.
Philip Larkin
#2. The inerrancy of Scripture means that scripture in the original manuscripts does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact.
Wayne Grudem
#3. To be perfectly honest the old habits, specifically deadlines, still very much inform what I do. I am brutally disciplined about getting manuscripts in on time.
Simon Winchester
#4. Everything began all over again immediately: arrival of manuscripts, requests, people's stories, each person mercilessly pushing ahead his own little demand (for love, for gratitude): No sooner has she departed than the world deafens me with its continuance.
Roland Barthes
#5. Anything added can be subtracted; anything verbose can be simplified; anything missing can be found. Manuscripts are not books but negatives waiting for the fixer that turns them into prints.
Chloe Thurlow
#6. Nobody ever saw anybody who had seen anybody who had heard of anybody that had ever seen anybody that had ever seen one of the original Hebrew manuscripts.
Robert G. Ingersoll
#7. It is the accursed inventions of this century that are ruining everything--artilleries, bombards, and, above all, printing, that other German pest. No more manuscripts, no more books! printing will kill bookselling. It is the end of the world that is drawing nigh.
Victor Hugo
#8. A persistent and age-old instinct makes us want to wander
Into regions yet untrod
And read what is still unread
In the manuscripts of God.
Willis R. Whitney
#9. But, indeed, we prefer books to pounds; and we love manuscripts better than florins; and we prefer small pamphlets to war horses.
Isaac D'Israeli
#10. I do write my manuscripts by hand, in pencil on legal pads. Then they are typed on a word processor by my typist.
Nelson DeMille
#11. Anyone who has invented a better mousetrap, or the contemporary equivalent, can expect to be harassed by strangers demanding that you read their unpublished manuscripts or undergo the humiliation of public speaking, usually on remote Midwestern campuses.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#12. 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
#13. My first three manuscripts were epic fantasy - like high fantasy - and then the fourth one was a historical fantasy about Mozart as a child. I still have a soft spot for that one!
Marie Lu
#14. My parents were both writers - they would type their manuscripts sitting side by side on the veranda of our house near Watford - so I wanted to do something different. I wanted to be a bluegrass singer, an architect, a landscape gardener, or to do something with animals.
Deborah Moggach
#15. Agents are essential, because publishers will not read unsolicited manuscripts.
Jackie Collins
#16. You meaner beauties of the night, That poorly satisfy our eyes More by your number than your light; You common people of the skies, What are you when the sun shall rise? This was printed with music as early as 1624, in East's Sixth Set of Books, and is found in many manuscripts.
Henry Wotton
#17. Now I have to have the biggest P.O. box in the entire post office to get all the manuscripts coming in.
Susie Bright
#18. A manuscript not submitted is a book not published.
Dan Poynter
#19. A lot of manuscripts that come in, you wonder by what outrageous fantasy the author believes that this should be pressed into print.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#20. Since my first novel was rescued from a slush pile, it makes me sad that most publishing houses no longer accept unsolicited manuscripts. Nor are many willing to take chances on novels that are not deemed immediately "marketable."
Katherine Paterson
#21. I was born in 1943 at Neston in the Wirral, not far from Liverpool where my father, Richard William Hunt was a lecturer in paleography, the study of mediaeval manuscripts.
Tim Hunt
#22. After my husband spell-checks one of my manuscripts, my editor says, 'It's been Normanized.'
Ruth Glick
#23. So: we're all tired. Now what? Manuscripts written in Club Med?
Brian Ferneyhough
#24. We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.
Marilyn Hacker
#25. In Brentwood we had a big safe-deposit box to put manuscripts in if we left town during fire season. It was such a big box that we never bothered to clean it out.
Joan Didion
#26. I love the process of cracking the spine for the first time and slowly sinking into a book. That will soon seem old-fashioned, I'm sure, like the time of illuminated manuscripts.
Edwidge Danticat
#27. I need to see the original paintings just as little as I have to read the original manuscripts of books.
Rene Magritte
#28. Logos (The Biblical Manuscripts/Canon of Scriptures) & Rhema (The Person/Life/Words/Death/Resurrection of Jesus Christ): The 'special' & 'ultimate' revelation of God. Without these revelations God would be unsearchable, unknowable, and inscrutable."
~R. Alan Woods [2013]
R. Alan Woods
#29. My paternal grandfather was a failed novelist. He stacked boxes of rejected manuscripts in a closet.
Laird Barron
#30. I'm constantly trying to keep people guessing as to what I'm doing, and I will spend enormous amounts of time looking at manuscripts and asking questions, and people will say, 'I know what his next book is about.'
Dan Brown
#31. There are too many people in the world as it is, but the supply of ancient manuscripts is severely limited.
Elizabeth Peters
#32. I never saw any of my dad's stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.
Stephen King
#33. The Polar Express was the easiest of my picture book manuscripts to write ... Once I realized the train was going to the North Pole, finding the story seemed less like a creative effort than an act of recollection. I felt, like the storys narrator, that I was remembering something, not making it up.
Chris Van Allsburg
#34. It is necessary to possess the oldest manuscripts, they aid genuine references in case of doubt.
Auliq Ice
#35. A scholar is a man with his inconvenience, that, when you ask him his opinion of any matter, he must go home and look up his manuscripts to know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#36. Recently, I looked back at my first manuscripts and was struck by the lack of space, of breath. That's exactly how it felt, back then ... like I was suffocating.
Patrick Modiano
#37. Why am I obsessed with the idea I can justify myself by getting manuscripts published? Is it an escape-an excuse for any social failure-so I can say "No, I don't go out for many extracurricular activities, but I spend a lot of time writing."
Sylvia Plath
#38. It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written.
Karl Marx
#39. My study is a converted garage which is largely lined with bookshelves and cardboard boxes filled with manuscripts of my film scripts, plays and books.
William Nicholson
#40. The Biblical manuscripts are quite unequivocally clear on the issue of marriage and its definition. The law of the land may change, however the Holy Writ shall not."
~R. Alan Woods [2013]
R. Alan Woods
#41. I've seen unpublished manuscripts where the writer doesn't know they are making fun of the villain - but they are. If you aren't afraid of your villain, how can your hero be afraid?
Gayle Lynds
#42. Seek wisdom in books, rare manuscripts, and cryptic poems if you will, but seek it out also in simple stones, and fragile herbs, and in the cries of wild birds. Listen to the whisperings of the wind and the roar of water if you would discover magic, for it is here that the old secrets are preserved.
Scott Cunningham
#43. You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.
Merce Cunningham
#44. Writers who learn to leave holes in manuscripts to be filled later master valuable skills in writing: they learn to proceed amid ambiguity and uncertainty
Wendy Laura Belcher
#45. My manuscripts sleep, while I cannot, for I am covered with poultices.
Frederic Chopin
#46. I save her marked-up manuscripts as an unluckier husband might save love letters.
Will Allison
#47. I didn't go to graduate school, where all the important writers seemed to be getting their start. I didn't pursue getting published in literary magazines. I didn't even send out countless pitch letters and manuscripts to agents.
Jami Attenberg
#48. After misery follow, or are at least promised to in the unwritten manuscripts of Gods, great things. Sometimes, that great thing can be death.
Nina -
#49. A typical agent in New York gets 400 query letters a month. Of those, they might ask to read 3-4 manuscripts, and of those, they might ask to represent 1.
Nicholas Sparks
#50. Soli Deo gloria.
Latin for Glory to God alone.
Bach used the initials (SDG) at the end of
all his musical manuscripts.
Bach
#51. The greatest importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls...lies in the discovery of biblical manuscripts dating back to only about 300 years after the close of the Old Testament canon.
Philip W. Comfort
#52. The real reason Milton went blind was to avoid reading unsolicited manuscripts.
Rita Mae Brown
#53. I'm gregarious with writers and never with manuscripts ... I [like to] create the illusion of seamless perfection, so I alone know the flawed homely process along the way.
Jonathan Lethem
#54. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.
John W. Campbell
#55. Himmler wants to send an expedition to Tibet to look for ancient manuscripts on the Aryans. The man is like a little schoolgirl. What culture is there in an old jug, I ask you?
Adolf Hitler
#56. I wake at 5 or 5:30 most mornings, make myself a latte and grab a cookie, write until 10 or 11, go have my favorite meal, 'second breakfast,' or grab coffee with friends, or play basketball. Then, around noon, I begin apologizing via email for the manuscripts I can't get to.
Jess Walter
#57. Know what happened to these Alexandrian manuscripts? The Roman Catholics used them as the foundation for their Bible. Then they spent nine centuries hunting down the real Bible to destroy it. But faithful Christians protected it - even with their blood.
David W. Daniels
#58. Two suitcases, in one the wardrobe, the earthly essentials, in the other- manuscripts, the spiritual supplies, then you are at home everywhere-Zweig GW Tagebuecher p. 383
Stefan Zweig
#61. As good as' always spells mediocrity. But when a writer's work is in competition with all those thousands of other manuscripts that pour over an editor's desk, he cannot afford to be 'as good as'; he (or she) must be 'better than.
Phyllis A. Whitney
#62. Nowadays I find so many 'evidences' in the manuscripts, it seems authors are colluding to wipe out the evidence from the written form.
James Oinam
#63. Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.
John Ruskin
#64. The usual way - through a long series of rejections, revising my manuscripts, and kept trying again and again. Finally I was fortunate enough to find a good agent.
Danielle Steel
#65. It's the accursed inventions of the age that are ruining everything - the artillery, the muskets, the cannons, and above all the printing press, that scourge brought from Germany. No more manuscripts, no more books. Printing is ruining bookselling. The end of the world is upon us.
Victor Hugo
#66. If you're very serious about writing it's helpful to find an agent. It's becoming more and more competitive to have your manuscript even looked at by an editor. Many companies don't accept unsolicited manuscripts anymore, so they'll pay more attention to something that comes in through an agent.
Ann M. Martin
#67. Think how slow would be your progress in learning without printed books: you could study only manuscripts, and those necessarily must be very few in number. Learn from this to value your books, and always handle them with care.
Dorothea Dix
#68. If the big publishers are doing so well, why do they require writers to send return postage with their manuscripts?
Dan Poynter
#69. I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.
Paul Theroux
#70. In fact, most of the changes found in early Christian manuscripts have nothing to do with theology or ideology. Far and away the most changes are the result of mistakes pure and simple slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders of one sort or another.
Bart D. Ehrman
#71. The synoptic Gospels of the New Testament manuscripts make us aware of Christ's character and gives us a view of the 'son-ship' He modeled which flowed out of that Divine character."
~R. Alan Woods [2013]
R. Alan Woods
#72. He was distinguished by a red eye that had hemorrhaged while proofreading unsolicited manuscripts.
Robert Klose
#73. Your book may be a masterpiece but do not suggest that to the publisher because many of the most hopeless manuscripts that have come his way have probably been so described by their authors.
Stanley Unwin
#74. Petrarch sometimes wrote letters to long-dead authors. He was also a dedicated hunter of classic manuscripts. Once, after discovering some previously unknown works of Cicero, he wrote Cicero the news.
David Markson
#75. Our New Testament text of today is a reconstructed or restored text. It has been reconstructed by modern scholarship from three independent lines of witnesses: the manuscripts, the versions, and the writings of early Christians (Church Fathers). In
Neil R. Lightfoot
#76. The account of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, as the manuscripts are inaccurately designated, and of the half a century of intense research that followed, is in itself a fascinating as well as an exasperating story.
Geza Vermes
#77. I submitted manuscripts to publishers. This was not so much a feeling that I should be published as a wish to escape the feared and hated drudgery of normal work.
Tanith Lee
#78. My books piled up before me for my use waiting in space where I placed them, they haven't disappeared, time's left its remnants and qualities for me to use
my words piled up, my texts, my manuscripts, my loves.
Allen Ginsberg
#79. Five-hundred years ago people were saying in manuscripts, "Can you believe these kids today?" They were saying that same phrase everyone says now. No one can believe the youth and what they're doing and how culture is going and how it might fall apart.
Joel McHale
#80. NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION P. 19 The unusual antiquity and reliability of the earliest surviving manuscripts at Leningrad and Cambridge and the surprisingly large number of medieval manuscripts
Bede
#81. I don't believe in classes where students criticize each other's manuscripts. Such criticism is generally composed in equal parts of ignorance, flattery, and spite. It's the blind leading the blind, and it can be dangerous. A teacher who tries to impose a way of writing on you can be dangerous, too.
Flannery O'Connor
#82. I started reading my manuscripts out loud, to hear what they sounded like. If the text flows with little effort, then I am satisfied, but if I keep stumbling and stuttering while I read, then I rewrite.
Gudjon Bergmann
#83. Whitman Press will publish three children's textbooks, based on your creed, for which you'll deliver manuscripts and artwork. The three books are: 1. Dagon and Jill 2. The Shadow Over Humpty Dumpty 3. A Children's Necronomicon (with pop-up section)
H.P. Lovecraft
#84. 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime. According to some ancient manuscripts 9 is not a prime number, but beyond the distant horizon of the oceans, in the New World that I am going to discover, there are surely lots of them.
Christopher Columbus
#85. Master the craft. Write lots, even if you never intend to do anything with it. Don't delete old, unpublished, or partial manuscripts. There are lots of occasions where you may be able to use some of that work. If the writing is strong, save it for later.
Eric Matheny
#86. Newton produced three times as many theological papers than scientific. These manuscripts consistently recorded Newton's belief in the author of creation as one and the same as the author of the Law and prophecy contained in the Bible.
David Flynn
#88. The Persian's mind, like his illuminated manuscripts, does not deal in perspective: two thousand years, if he happens to know anything about them, are as exciting as the day before yesterday ...
Freya Stark
#89. Manuscript editions didn't immediately die out with the printing explosion that burst across Europe in the 1460s and 1470s. Manuscripts continued to be produced into the 16th century, many decades after presses had spread to most minor cities in Western Europe.
Ian Lamont
#90. I keep working under the delusion that someday a library will ask for my manuscripts.
Walter Wager
#91. I don't listen to music when I write, but I do turn on appropriate music when I read portions of my manuscripts back to myself - kind of like adding a soundtrack to help shape mood.
Erik Larson
#92. When I knew what I had to do / I took all my notebooks, all my manuscripts / and ate them page by page / so I could take my words with me
Nicole Blackman
#93. I don't teach narrative theory by itself anymore, but I kind of use it when critiquing student manuscripts. So, it works its way in there, whether I like it or not.
Rob Roberge
#94. Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and copying texts. Certainly e-books seem magical to me.
Paul Theroux
#95. All writers are crazy. So never mind what the editors and your family and your critique group tells you. Submit your manuscripts and keep submitting until you get an offer. Then you can be crazy, with a paycheck.
MaryJanice Davidson
#96. In my qualified opinion as a Biblical scholar, there is 'massive' and overwhelming historical evidence that the New Testament manuscripts are in fact reliable."
~R. Alan Woods [2013]
R. Alan Woods
