Manuscripts Quotes

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.

I won't leave any unfinished manuscripts.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.

I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.

So: we're all tired. Now what? Manuscripts written in Club Med?

Now I have to have the biggest P.O. box in the entire post office to get all the manuscripts coming in.

I keep working under the delusion that someday a library will ask for my manuscripts.

In Brentwood we had a big safe-deposit box to put manuscripts in if we left town during fire season. It was such a big box that we never bothered to clean it out.

A typical agent in New York gets 400 query letters a month. Of those, they might ask to read 3-4 manuscripts, and of those, they might ask to represent 1.

Agents are essential, because publishers will not read unsolicited manuscripts.

I don't listen to music when I write, but I do turn on appropriate music when I read portions of my manuscripts back to myself - kind of like adding a soundtrack to help shape mood.

I never saw any of my dad's stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.

The usual way - through a long series of rejections, revising my manuscripts, and kept trying again and again. Finally I was fortunate enough to find a good agent.

We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.