Manuscript Quotes

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good. (Samuel Johnson)

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Oliver Herford

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.

Ring Lardner

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

Aleister Crowley

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

Dick Bruna

I teach one semester a year, and this year I'm just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion.

Tobias Wolff

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

When I was growing up the publishing world seemed so far away. When my mother wrote a book, she would look up the address of publishers on the backs of the books she owned and send off her manuscript.

Kiran Desai

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

William Cowper

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it-whole-heartedly-and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

Arthur Quiller-Couch

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 But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels...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

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

Walter Jon Williams

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

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

Sometimes I have given my husband a manuscript to read that has turned out to have fantastic rave reviews and he'll tell me it is no good. Well, if I didn't know him as well as I know him I would be terribly depressed.

Katherine Dunham

As a writer, you have control of the words you put on the page. But once that manuscript leaves your hand, you give control to the reader. As a director, you are limited by everything: weather, budget, and egos.

Nicholas Meyer

The greatest threat to a robust, autonomous civil society is the ever-growing Leviathan state and those like Obama who see it as the ultimate expression of the collective. Obama compounds the fallacy by declaring the state to be the font of entrepreneurial success. How so? It created the infrastructure - roads, bridges, schools, Internet - off which we all thrive. Absurd. We don't credit the Swiss postal service with the Special Theory of Relativity because it transmitted Einstein's manuscript to the Annalen der Physik.

Charles Krauthammer

Karthik Raja is immensely talented. It's unfortunate he hasn't got the right break. Be it technology, manuscript or knowledge of genres, he is thorough. I'm sure he will make it ASAP.

Yuvan Shankar Raja

I believe that at times such as these my modest efforts may be useful to mankind. I have shown how the new art has succeeded in bringing about pure relationships, and furthermore how these can be created in day-to-day life. [Mondrian tried to convince the Dutch publisher Stols to publish his new manuscript 'L'art et la vie'].

Piet Mondrian

The manuscript lay like a dust-rag on his desk, and Eitel found, as he had found before, that the difficulty of art was that it forced a man back on his life, and each time the task was more difficult and distasteful.

Norman Mailer

Manuscript culture is conversational if only because the writer and his audience are physically related by the form of publication as performance. (Marshall McLuhan)

The manuscript shaped medieval literary conventions at all levels.

Marshall McLuhan

The celebrated earthy tactility of Rabelais is a massive backwash of receding manuscript culture.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Balzac has often provided us with the tragic spectacle of an old man in love. Obliged now to obtain with gifts and favors what his personal charm won for him in his earlier days, the aged lover will ruin himself for every young woman clever enough to waken a crazy hope in his breast. Chateaubriand, who knew only too well what such suffering was like, left a terrible manuscript entitle Amour et Vieillesse; it is the long and grievous lament of a lover who does not know hot to grow old. "Those who have loved women a great deal will always love them; that is their punishment." And women who have loved many men are punished by hearing the younger among them say with genuine surprise: "I'm told she was once very beautiful."

André Maurois

Previous
1 (Current)
2
3
4
Next