Manuscripts Quotes

• 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

  Art, Book, Writing

  St. Mark's Rest preface (1877)

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• 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

  Literature, Sometimes, Fairy

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• I keep working under the delusion that someday a library will ask for my manuscripts.

  Walter Wager

  Library, Someday, Delusion

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• Agents are essential, because publishers will not read unsolicited manuscripts.

  Jackie Collins

  Aquariums, Essentials, Agents

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• 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

  Writing, Feelings, Wish

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• I never saw any of my dad's stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.

  Stephen King

  Mother, Dad, Stories

  "The Stephen King interview, uncut and unpublished". Interview with Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. September 14, 2000.

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• Now I have to have the biggest P.O. box in the entire post office to get all the manuscripts coming in.

  Susie Bright

  Office, Boxes, Posts

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• He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odor, its form, its title. What he loved in a manuscript was its old illegible date, the bizarre and strange Gothic characters, the heavy gilding which loaded its drawings. It was its pages covered with dust — dust of which he breathed the sweet and tender perfume with delight.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Sweet, Book, Character

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• Manuscripts don't burn.

  Mikhail Bulgakov

  Mikhail Bulgakov (2016). “THE MASTER AND MARGARITA: 50th-Anniversary Edition (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.210, Penguin

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• I don't listen to music when I write - I find it distracting.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Writing, Listening To Music

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• I was the type who looked at discussions of What Is Truth only with a view toward correcting the manuscript. If you were to quote "I am that I am," for example, I thought that the fundamental problem was where to put the comma, inside the quotation marks or outside.

  Umberto Eco

  Views, Example, Quotation Marks

  Umberto Eco (2007). “Foucault's Pendulum”, p.62, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• There are three infallible ways of pleasing an author, and the three form a rising scale of compliment: 1, to tell him you have read one of his books; 2, to tell him you have read all of his books; 3, to ask him to let you read the manuscript of his forthcoming book. No. 1 admits you to his respect; No. 2 admits you to his admiration; No. 3 carries you clear into his heart.

  Mark Twain

  Book, Heart, Three

  Mark Twain, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Mark Twain: All 13 Novels, Short Stories, Poetry and Essays”, p.2039, GENERAL PRESS

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• 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

  Work, Writing, Persistence

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• Publishing is no longer simply a matter of picking worthy manuscripts and putting them on offer. It is now as important to market books properly, to work with the bookstore chains to getterms, co-op advertising, and the like. The difficulty is that publishers who can market are most often not the publishers with worthy lists.

  Olivia Goldsmith

  Book, Important, Matter

  Olivia Goldsmith (2014). “The Bestseller”, p.370, Diversion Books

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• The manuscript in the drawer either rots or ripens.

  Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

  Drawers

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• Do you know what you are? You are a manuscript oƒ a divine letter. You are a mirror reflecting a noble face. This universe is not outside of you. Look inside yourself; everything that you want, you are already that.

  Rumi

  Mirrors, Faces, Looks

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• In my office in Florida I have, I think, 30 manuscript piles around the room. Some are screenplays or comic books or graphic novels. Some are almost done. Some I'm rewriting. If I'm working with a co-writer, they'll usually write the first draft. And then I write subsequent drafts.

  James Patterson

  Book, Writing, Thinking

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• 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

  Strong, Glasses, Editing

  Source: bigother.com

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• Marx's early manuscripts, with their roots in the Enlightenment and Romanticism, derived fundamental concepts such as alienation from a conception of human nature - what we would call genetically determined.

  Noam Chomsky

  Roots, Enlightenment, Fundamentals

  Source: libcom.org

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• But when I say it isn't meant for anyone's eyes, I don't mean it in the sense of one of those novel manuscripts people keep in a drawer, insisting they don't care if anyone else ever reads it or not.The people I have known who do that, I am convinced, have no faith in themselves as writers and know, deep down, that the novel is flawed, that they don't know how to tell the story, or they don't understand what the story is, or they haven't really got a story to tell. The manuscript in the drawer is the story.

  Katharine Weber

  Eye, Mean, People

  Katharine Weber (2011). “The Music Lesson: A Novel”, p.16, Crown

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• Sometimes I do work on a longer manuscript in tandem with one or two shorter pieces - whether it's a short story or an essay (though I don't write many of the latter).

  Christine Sneed

  Writing, Two, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I don't mean to be flippant about cancer - it was hard, it was tough and it was scary. Then my next manuscript was about cancer because I had a whole new topic to write about. And because I wrote, it didn't take over. Writing took the chaos out of cancer.

  Natalie Goldberg

  Cancer, Writing, Mean

  "The Writing Life". Interview with Mark Matousek, www.psychologytoday.com. July 19, 2016.

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• 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

  Book, Ideas, Insane

  Source: bigother.com

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• I do believe that the collapse of the traditional media is catastrophic for our democracy, but I wasn't about to mythologize it. I understand its structural flaws, and the lies it tells, which are primarily, but not always, the lies of omission, and I wasn't going to leave that out. Knopf offered to publish the book but they said that an editor was going to "take out all the negativity," which, of course, I wasn't going to accept. I had been paid half my advance, and I had Nation Books buy the manuscript for that half.

  Chris Hedges

  Lying, Believe, Book

  Interview with David Barsamian, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. July 14, 2011.

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• 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

  Believe, Fall, Kids

  Source: www.esquire.com

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