Top 233 Manuscript Quotes & Sayings

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

I think once you have done all you can to a manuscript, let it find its way in the world.

My husband, William Sutcliffe, the writer, is my first reader and in many ways my most important. That initial reading of the manuscript is crucial and irreplaceable and you want them to approach it as someone in a bookshop might, not knowing much about it. So I've got into this pattern of not telling Will anything about the book I'm working on. He often knows nothing about the book I'm working on at all until I give him the whole manuscript and ask him to read it. The book I'm working on at the moment he knows nothing about. No one does.

I thought it was amazing to work with authors, to get a manuscript and try to make up a cover for it.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

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.

The unpublished manuscript is like an uncon-fessed sin that festers in the soul, corrupting and contaminating it.

I have always been jealous of artists. The smell of the studio, the names of the various tools, the look of a half-finished canvas all shout of creation. What do writers have in comparison? Only the flat paper, the clacketing of the typewriter or the scrape of a pen across a yellow page. And then, when the finished piece is presented, there is a small wonder on one hand, a manuscript smudged with erasures or crossed out lines on the other. The impact of the painting is immediate, the manuscript must unfold slowly through time.

When the adversaries of Erasmus had got the Trinity into his edition, they threw by their manuscript as an old almanac out of date.

I basically wrote five books with 'Night Soldiers,' called them novellas, and came in with a 600-page manuscript.

Although no one loves a typo, it's close to impossible to eradicate every single little mistake in a manuscript.

To a student: Dear Miss - I have read about sixteen pages of your manuscript . . . I suffered exactly the same treatment at the hands of my teachers who disliked me for my independence and passed over me when they wanted assistants. . . . Keep your manuscript for your sons and daughters, in order that they may derive consolation from it and not give a damn for what their teachers tell them or think of them. . . . There is too much education altogether.

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

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.

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.

I can almost always read a new manuscript overnight.

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

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

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

A manuscript not submitted is a book not published.

The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.

A good part of the work is just reading a manuscript and coming to the office. I can't imagine wanting to even read an article about book publishing.

Marion Zimmer Bradley took apart my first submission to her, covered the manuscript in red ink revisions, and told me to try her again. I had never been so reeling with authorial joy as I had been that day, holding Marion's letter and seeing that ravaged manuscript - finally, it meant that someone cared!

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.

... the embryological record, as it is usually presented to us, is both imperfect and misleading. It may be compared to an ancient manuscript, with many of the sheets lost, others displaced, and with spurious passages interpolated by a later hand. ... Like the scholar with his manuscript, the embryologist has by a process of careful and critical examination to determine where the gaps are present, to detect the later insertions, and to place in order what has been misplaced.

I like when the manuscript keeps its authentic style and form, so even if I have accepted some advice from editors, I don't really want to adapt the manuscript to the needs and expectations of the readers.

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

Sometimes a manuscript is like bread dough. You have to abuse it.

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

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!

The manuscript looks chaotic, even by mathematics standards.

I score everything by hand on manuscript paper and then make copies.

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

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

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

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.

Seventeen publishers rejected the manuscript, at which time we knew we had something pretty hot.

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

A manuscript under way always gave me something to do; only while enduring the aimlessness between books was I truly glum.

The most important lesson in the writing trade is that any manuscript is improved if you cut away the fat.

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.

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.

I have a manuscript that I'm almost done with, but I've been saying that forever. I'm on what I think will be the second-to-last chapter. It's a story about chance and coincidence.

I'd had 12 different job titles in publishing before I typed 'The End' at the bottom of a manuscript page. I thought the manuscript was in great shape; I was pretty proud of myself. Then I sent it to some publishing friends, and they tore it apart.

When Sondheim was visiting the Library of Congress, where the manuscript of 'Porgy and Bess' is housed, he was so overcome with emotion while holding the score in his hands that he shed a tear. He shed several tears, but one of the tears actually fell onto the original manuscript. And he was horrified.

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.

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

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.

Trends come and go, and if you try to latch onto a trend it will likely be passé by the time you have completed your manuscript.

The manuscript in the drawer either rots or ripens.

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.

Our life is a book to which we add daily, until suddenly we are finished, and then the manuscript is burned.

I was eighteen when I wrote my first book, and I can't remember what it was called. I have no idea where the manuscript is - I lost it when I was twenty-one.

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

I say that I've never been late with a manuscript, but I don't mean to be arrogant; it's that I simply want to get it done as soon as possible so I can be set free.

In the night ride across the Wular lake a small storm made me worry for the safety of my manuscript (Rajatarangini). It seemed as if the goddess of wisdom - Sharada, represented by waters of Kashmir, was unwilling to let me abduct the manuscript. This is what happened 1200 years ago to the Chinese pilgrim Hiuen-Tsang, who had to leave his Sanskrit manuscript in the angry Indus River.

This was a manuscript of the night we couldn’t read.

I've always been captivated by the Voynich Manuscript - the mysterious, 15th-century encrypted codex that still baffles cryptologists, linguists, and historians.

Egypt has managed to reclaim the 13-page papyrus manuscript.

Traditional publishers require an author to submit a manuscript six months in advance, and if pressed, no later than two or three.