Manuscript Quotations

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.

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.

When you start writing a picture book, you have to write a manuscript that has enough language to prompt the illustrator to get his or her gears running, but then you end up having to cut it out because you don't want any of the language to be redundant to the pictures that are being drawn.

I starved and slept on park benches. I wrapped myself in the pages of my manuscript to keep warm. For two and a half years I took odd jobs; nothing was going to deter me.

I get like a melody that comes up and I try to write it down or record it. Hum it into a tape recorder or write it down on some manuscript paper. It could happen at any time, on the road or off the road, but mostly, you know, at home.

I had already drafted the manuscript that would become my first book by the time I graduated from college, but I had no idea what to do with it.

A novelist can never be his own reader, except when he is ridding his manuscript of syntax errors, repetitions, or the occasional superfluous paragraph.

When I began writing in the mid-1960s, I thought it was not important for readers to know whether I was male or female. Also, I was a great admirer of E.B. White, so I may have thought that it would bring me luck to submit my first manuscript as 'E.L.' But if I were starting out today, I would use my first name.

When I'm writing the text for a book like 'Little White Rabbit,' I read it aloud, alone, in my studio, again and again and again - because the rhythm has to be exactly right. After I get my manuscript to the point where I think it is perfect, I begin to think about what I want the art to look like.

With a computer, you make your changes on the screen and then you print out a clean copy. With a typewriter, you can't get a clean manuscript unless you start again from scratch. It's an incredibly tedious process.

Cut your manuscript ruthlessly but never throw anything away: it's amazing how often a discarded scene or description, which wouldn't fit in one place, will work perfectly later.

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

It was in a stonecutter's house where I went to have a headstone made for Raftery's grave that I found a manuscript book of his poems, written out in the clear beautiful Irish characters.

When I finished graduate school, I had a master's of fine arts from a prestigious institution, a manuscript that would eventually become my first published book - and almost no marketable skills.

J. K. Rowling's first 'Harry Potter' manuscript was rejected 12 times. Stephen King's 'Carrie' was rejected 30 times. 'Gone With The Wind' was rejected 38 times. I was immensely proud to have beaten them all.

We appreciate everything they've done. Gary Frost has been great. Fortunately, most of our manuscript material was spared by the storm. The overall number requiring some type of repair is pretty small.

When you've written your characters into a corner, you just hand the manuscript over to your partner and make her fix it.

One of my graduate school professors, to whom I started sending poems when I started writing again after a 10-year hiatus, suggested I prepare a book manuscript which he could send to publishers for me.

But every single Jewish manuscript is evidence of an individual's commitment to that manuscript.

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 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.

Just before the bidding was to start, the auctioneer told the audience the manuscript was being withdrawn because it was bought by the society. There was a small round of applause, but the auctioneer acknowledged that some of the bidders in the hall might be disappointed.

I wrote a great deal of a novel, 'Winter's Tale,' on the roof of a Brooklyn Heights tenement on Henry Street. I was a technical climber, and now and then I would put down my manuscript and get up to walk along parapets and climb walls and chimneys.

I was the only one in America with the book (in manuscript form). Released into the wrong hands, it could have ended up on the Internet and losing a lot of people a lot of money.

Two mistakes haunt me: Not completing the manuscript of my book sooner and not buying Microsoft in 1986 before it split nine times.

Sometimes I write less than I'd like but do research. Other times, editor's notes or a copy-edited manuscript or page proofs for a forthcoming novel mean that I need to put my attentions elsewhere for a day or two, but I always come back to writing.

Alas, that Spring should vanish with the Rose! / That Youth's sweet-scented Manuscript should close!

This is an amazing find. The manuscript was only known from a brief description in a catalogue in 1890 and it has never before been seen or described by Beethoven scholars. Its rediscovery will allow a complete reassessment of this extraordinary music. Sotheby's has been very fortunate in selling a large number of Beethoven manuscripts in recent years, including a previously unknown composition, but this is even more interesting. It is a completely lost autograph of a major work and such a visually exciting and extraordinary manuscript.

It is undoubtedly the most significant Lennon manuscript to be offered at auction, and arguably, the most significant musical manuscript of the 20th century.

I had actually finished the manuscript of 'The Wild Trees' and turned it in to Random House when all of a sudden word came. Michael Taylor and his colleague, Chris Atkins, another explorer, have just knocked one out of the park. They found the world's tallest tree. The tree is named Hyperion, 379.1 feet tall.

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!

I gave him the manuscript and let him do what he would with it,

By the time I was 23 or 24 and had written the first manuscript of 'The Final Winter', I knew I wanted to make it a career but didn't know how. It took me a long time to grow into myself, but when my love of writing returned, it did so with an enormous amount of venom. It is now a mainstay in my life.

By 1835, Mozart's star was rising and any relic connected to him was sought after. We don't know whether his widow was given money for the manuscript or whether it was a sweetener for some kind of financial favor.

The manuscript was only known from a brief description in a catalogue in 1890 and it has never before been seen or described by Beethoven scholars.

An author's ability to bring a marketing synopsis to the table - along with a great manuscript - makes a difference in what books get picked up. This is true for both fiction and nonfiction titles. You need to show your publisher what you've got in your marketing arsenal.

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 s

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good.