Manuscript Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Write a lot. And finish what you write. Don't join writer's clubs and go sit around having coffee reading pieces of your manuscript to people. Write it. Finish it. I set those rules up years ago, and nothing's changed.

And, finally, Lincoln was not a good impromptu speaker; he was at his best when he could read from a carefully prepared manuscript. Though maybe a teleprompter could have helped that!

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.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

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.

I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it's based on is whether it's good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and try to rewrite it.

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

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