Manuscripts Quotes - Page 8

• 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 But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels...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

  Library, Stories, Literature

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• 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

  Children, Writing, Ideas

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• 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

  Nice, Moving, Looks

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• I can tell from about 20 yards away when someone has a manuscript for me. I can just tell - they have that look.

  Mark Leyner

  Yards, Looks, I Can

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

  Walter Jon Williams

  Years, Two, Rift

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• Cut like crazy. Less is more. I've often read manuscripts - including my own - where I've got to the beginning of, say, chapter two and have thought: “This is where the novel should actually start.” A huge amount of information about character and backstory can be conveyed through small detail. The emotional attachment you feel to a scene or a chapter will fade as you move on to other stories. Be business-like about it.

  Sarah Waters

  Crazy, Moving, Character

  "Ten rules for writing fiction (part two)" by Hilary Mantel, www.theguardian.com. February 19, 2010.

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• 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

  Children, Talking, Audio

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• Would you please publish the enclosed manuscript or return it without delay, as I have other irons in the fire.

  Elinor Glyn

  Fire, Iron, Delay

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• 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

  Book, Technique, Metaphor

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• We have the Annunciation, the Conception, the Birth and the Adoration, as described in the first and second chapters of Luke's gospel; and as we have historical assurance that the chapters in Matthew's gospel which contain the miraculous birth are an after addition not in the earliest manuscripts, it seems probable that these two poetical chapters in Luke may also be unhistorical, and borrowed from the Egyptian accounts of the miraculous births of their kings.

  Samuel Sharpe

  Kings, Two, Historical

  Samuel Sharpe (1863). “Egyptian mythology and Egyptian Christianity, with their influence on the opinions of modern Christendom”, p.19

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• All writing seems to me worse in the state of proof than in any other form. In manuscript one's own wisdom is rather remarkable to one, but in proof it has the effect of one's private furniture repeated in the shop windows. And then there is the sense that the worst errors will go to press unnoticed!

  George Eliot

  Writing, Errors, Furniture

  George Eliot (1955). “The George Eliot Letters: 1874-1877”

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• Just about everything significant in my life happened after I passed forty. I was a housewife and mother, but yearned to be a writer. I worked at my writing whenever I could snatch a moment, and I assembled several manuscripts. I was just about forty when my first novel, East Wind, West Wind, was published. Then a few months later came The Good Earth. My career was launched at last, and it has given me the richest possible satisfaction

  Pearl S. Buck

  Mother, Writing, Wind

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• 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

  May, Pigeons, Return

  Rose Macaulay (1926). “A Casual Commentary”

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• 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

  Years, Two, Yesterday

  Freya Stark (1964). “The Journey's Echo: Selections”

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• Nevertheless, hateful as saying 'No' always is to an imaginative person, and certain as the offence may be that it will cause to individuals whose own work does not require isolated effort, the writer who is engaged on a book must learn to say it. He must say it consistently to all interrupters; to the numerous callers and correspondents who want him to speak, open bazaars, see them for 'only' ten minutes, attend literary parties, put people up, or read, correct and find publishers for semi-literate manuscripts by his personal friends.

  Vera Brittain

  Book, Party, People

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• 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

  Book, Cutting, House

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

  Golo Mann

  Steel, Easy, Mills

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• 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

  Writing, Sacrifice, Balance

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• 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

  Atheism, Erasmus, Trinity

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• I revise the manuscript till I can't read it any longer, then I get somebody to type it. Then I revise the typing. Then it's retyped again. Then there's a third typing, which is the final one. Nothing should then remain that offends the eye.

  Robert Graves

  Eye, Finals, Should

  Robert Graves, Frank L. Kersnowski (1989). “Conversations with Robert Graves”, p.102, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Why is this soe long detaind in a dark manuscript, that if printed would be a Light to the World, & a Universal Blessing?

  Thomas Traherne

  Dark, Blessing, Light

  Thomas Traherne, Jan Ross (2005). “The Works of Thomas Traherne: Inducements to retirednes ; A sober view of Dr Twisses, his considerations ; Seeds of eternity, or, The nature of the soul ; The kingdom of God”, p.14, DS Brewer

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• In the usual way 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. In my twenties some of my work for children was published by Macmillan. However, I was twenty-seven before my adult novel, The Birthgrave, was taken by DAW Books in the USA. This enabled me finally to stop doing stupid and soul-killing jobs, and start working day and night as a professional writer. It felt like a rescue from damnation, and still does.

  Tanith Lee

  Jobs, Children, Stupid

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• I guess I'm what you call a slush-piler. I just sent my manuscripts to the slush pile of publishers and hoped for the best. Over seven years, I was rejected seven times on three different books. The fourth attempt was picked up by a small publisher, and I still have great memories of staying up all night, talking to my brother and sisters (my dad called me at 2:30 in the morning because I was overseas).

  Markus Zusak

  Morning, Brother, Memories

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• I have an office in my house, with a comfy red print reading chair and a soft cream-colored desk. After I walk Winston the Wonder dog and have my breakfast, I head to my office. Every single day. Sometimes, when I'm working on revisions, I print off my manuscript and go to a coffee shop to work. But mostly you can find me in my office.

  Kirby Larson

  Dog, Coffee, Reading

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• All we can say is that, as the result of a process which went on from the fourth century to about the eighth, a standard type of text was produced, which is found in the vast majority of the manuscripts that have come down to us. At least ninety-six per cent of the extant manuscripts of the Greek New Testament are later than the eighth century; and of those only a handful preserve traces of the other types of text which were in existence before the adoption of the standard text, and out of which it was created.

  Frederic G. Kenyon

  Adoption, Greek, Six

  "The Story Of The Bible" by Frederic G. Kenyon. Ch. IV, From manuscript To Print, p. 39, 1949.

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