Manuscripts Quotes - Page 7

• I take editing seriously. It's a joy to edit. I always hand a manuscript to several editors and can't wait to get back their notes and see what they've said. I don't criticize myself for making blunders here and there, because it's just natural. You write in chunks, and you may not remember that that sentence you wrote yesterday had the same word repeated three times. I do enjoy that. I love the feeling of repairing. Repairing is really nice.

  Steve Martin

  Nice, Writing, Editing

  "Steve Martin: The Powells.com Interview". Interview with Jill Owens, www.powells.com. November 29, 2010.

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• I have a secret goal with my editor - he has asthma and uses his inhaler, and after I send him a new manuscript, I'll have his assistant phone me and tell me how many times he had to get his inhaler out while reading a draft. It's my secret laugh meter.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Reading, Phones, Editors

  Source: www.writersdigest.com

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• I have learned patience, for sure. Pre-publication is a long waiting game, especially for authors of picture books. We write the manuscript, sign the contract, and wait. It takes a while for the art director to find an illustrator and then the illustrator works on the sketches, and depending on those first round of sketches, it could be a few more months before you see a final illustration. I was surprised at how long it takes for all the pieces to come together.

  Renee Watson

  Art, Book, Writing

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• 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

  Editors, Pages, Would Be

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

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• The syndicates take the strip and sell it to newspapers and split the income with the cartoonists. Syndicates are essentially agents. Now, can you imagine a novelist giving his literary agent the ownership of his characters and all reprint, television, and movie rights before the agent takes the manuscript to a publisher? Obviously, an author would have to be a raving lunatic to agree to such a deal, but virtually every cartoonist does exactly that when a syndicate demands ownership before agreeing to sell the strip to newspapers.

  Bill Watterson

  Movie, Character, Rights

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• Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.

  John W. Campbell

  Home, Editors, Writing And Reading

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• 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

  Book, Play, Scripts

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• What havoc has been made of books through every century of the Christian era? Where are fifty gospels, condemned as spurious by the bull of Pope Gelasius? Where are the forty wagon-loads of Hebrew manuscripts burned in France, by order of another pope, because suspected of heresy? Remember the 'index expurgatorius', the inquisition, the stake, the axe, the halter and the guillotine.

  John Adams

  Christian, Book, Order

  John Adams (1851). “The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations”, p.479

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• The border between editing and ghostwriting is, at its extremes, a bit porous. An editor really improves and sometimes restructures a manuscript and suggests changes.

  Judith Thurman

  Editing, Editors, Borders

  "Ask the Author Live: Judith Thurman on Laura Ingalls Wilder". Live chat, www.newyorker.com. July 31, 2009.

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• Whatever artistry may occur within the manuscript, the magic happens for me in the last draft. Whatever I have been resistant to say must finally be said. In the end, I see where my pencil has been leading me.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Magic, May, Lasts

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Don't wait for success, but for the respect and interest of those who read you. At the start it could be a classmate, someone who shares your interests. Before sending off the manuscript for a novel to a publishing house, it would be a good idea to try writing short stories, and publishing them in a local magazine.

  Dacia Maraini

  Writing, Publishing House, Ideas

  "A ‘special’ writer. Dacia Maraini in interview". Interview with Vincenza Fanizza, www.threemonkeysonline.com.

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• I've always worked at the piano; I like to hear what I'm doing, I like the sound, to hear the actual sound. I get bored just looking at a manuscript.

  Richard Meale

  Piano, Bored, Sound

  "The Music Show" with Andrew Ford, www.abc.net.au. August 24, 2002.

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• Suggestions? Put it aside for a few days, or longer, do other things, try not to think about it. Then sit down and read it (printouts are best I find, but that's just me) as if you've never seen it before. Start at the beginning. Scribble on the manuscript as you go if you see anything you want to change. And often, when you get to the end you'll be both enthusiastic about it and know what the next few words are. And you do it all one word at a time.

  Neil Gaiman

  Writing, Thinking, Trying

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• 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

  Science, Giving, Ramanujan

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• Today there survives more than 25,0000 partial and complete, ancient handwritten manuscript copies of the New Testament. These hand written manuscripts have allowed scholars and textual critics to go back and verify that the Bible we have in our possession today is the same Bible that the early church possessed 2,000 years ago.

  Charlie Campbell

  Bible, Hands, Years

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• Book burning is a charming old custom, hallowed by antiquity. It has been practiced for centuries by fascists, communists, atheists, school children, rival authors, and tired librarians. Like everything of importance since the invention of the cloak and the shroud, its origins are cloaked in mystery and shrouded in secrecy. Some scholars believe that the first instance of book burning occurred in the Middle Ages, when a monk was trying to illuminate a manuscript. All agree that book burning was almost non-existent during the period when books were made of stone.

  Richard Armour

  Atheist, Children, Believe

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• Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others; but of the three, the only quite trustworthy one is the last. The acts of a nation may be triumphant by its good fortune; and its words mighty by the genius of a few of its children: but its art, only by the general gifts and common sympathies of the race.

  John Ruskin

  Art, Children, Book

  St. Mark's Rest preface (1877)

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• To refer even in passing to unpublished or struggling authors and their problems is to put oneself at some risk, so I will say here and now that any unsolicited manuscripts or typescripts sent to me will be destroyed unread. You must make your way yourself. Why you should be so set on the nearly always disappointing profession is a puzzling question.

  Kingsley Amis

  Struggle, Writing, Risk

  Kingsley Amis (1990). “The Amis collection: selected non-fiction, 1954-1990”, Arrow

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• I began writing 'Matterhorn' in 1975 and for more than 30 years I kept working on my novel in my spare time, unable to get an agent or publisher to even read the manuscript.

  Karl Marlantes

  Writing, Years, Agents

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• 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

  Book, Men, Design

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• 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

  Dog, Men, Years

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• 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

  Criminals, Sometimes, Crime

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• Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place.

  Margaret Haddix

  Writing, Long, Firsts

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• 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

  Real, Two, Giving

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• Maybe it's because we as writers are alone so often, are so attuned to listening to the run of our own thoughts, that we find it more natural to write down the thoughts rather than the deeds of our characters. But speaking as a teacher who has spent some twenty years slogging through manuscripts where thoughts and exposition pile up as thick as the aftermath of a California mudslide, I can attest to the power of the evocative detail, gesture, or figment of speech.

  Les Standiford

  Running, Teacher, Character

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