A number of years ago, when I had an exhibition of my work, the people in charge who came to pick up my manuscripts saw them piled up haphazardly in the garage and were shocked. 'What? They'll grow mold like this!' they said. People who do things properly apparently make a dedicated manuscript room, where they can control humidity.
Akira Toriyama
So: we're all tired. Now what? Manuscripts written in Club Med?
Brian Ferneyhough
I'm constantly trying to keep people guessing as to what I'm doing, and I will spend enormous amounts of time looking at manuscripts and asking questions, and people will say, 'I know what his next book is about.'
Dan Brown
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.
Danielle Steel
Books were a huge part of my childhood growing up. We would go on vacation, and my mom was always carting manuscripts around.
David Grann
My parents were both writers - they would type their manuscripts sitting side by side on the veranda of our house near Watford - so I wanted to do something different. I wanted to be a bluegrass singer, an architect, a landscape gardener, or to do something with animals.
Deborah Moggach
Think how slow would be your progress in learning without printed books: you could study only manuscripts, and those necessarily must be very few in number. Learn from this to value your books, and always handle them with care.
Dorothea Dix
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.
Erik Larson
I've seen unpublished manuscripts where the writer doesn't know they are making fun of the villain - but they are. If you aren't afraid of your villain, how can your hero be afraid?
Gayle Lynds
I won't leave any unfinished manuscripts.
Harold Robbins
I don't have a trunk of manuscripts.
Henry Mancini
Agents are essential, because publishers will not read unsolicited manuscripts.
Jackie Collins
I didn't go to graduate school, where all the important writers seemed to be getting their start. I didn't pursue getting published in literary magazines. I didn't even send out countless pitch letters and manuscripts to agents.
Jami Attenberg
I wake at 5 or 5:30 most mornings, make myself a latte and grab a cookie, write until 10 or 11, go have my favorite meal, 'second breakfast,' or grab coffee with friends, or play basketball. Then, around noon, I begin apologizing via email for the manuscripts I can't get to.
Jess Walter
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.
Joan Didion
Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.
John Ruskin
The Bodleian Library, next to the Sheldonian, is one of the great libraries of the world. As well as holding most of the books printed in England since the first quarter of the 17th century, it houses priceless printed texts, manuscripts, and collections.
Justin Cartwright
My paternal grandfather was a failed novelist. He stacked boxes of rejected manuscripts in a closet.
Laird Barron
Of course, authors can still burn their manuscripts - but once something is out in the world, especially if it ever saw the digital light of day, it's harder and harder to call it back.
Maria Konnikova
My first three manuscripts were epic fantasy - like high fantasy - and then the fourth one was a historical fantasy about Mozart as a child. I still have a soft spot for that one!
Marie Lu
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.
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.
Recently, I looked back at my first manuscripts and was struck by the lack of space, of breath. That's exactly how it felt, back then... like I was suffocating.
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.
Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and copying texts. Certainly e-books seem magical to me.
By virtue of the standing and prestige of President Ben-Zvi, some 3,000 manuscripts originating from Arab lands, some of them of major significance, have been deposited at the Ben-Zvi Institute. In contrast to the Aleppo Codex, most of these documents were donated willingly, in the confidence that the institute would protect and preserve them.
I think I'm from the 18th century, not even the 19th. I don't even use a typewriter. I prefer longhand, and that's how I submit my manuscripts to my publishers.
After my husband spell-checks one of my manuscripts, my editor says, 'It's been Normanized.'
To be perfectly honest the old habits, specifically deadlines, still very much inform what I do. I am brutally disciplined about getting manuscripts in on time.
My three years at the NIH were critical in my scientific education. I learned an immense amount about the research process: developing assays, purifying macromolecules, documenting a discovery by many approaches, and writing clear manuscripts describing what is known and what remains to be investigated.
I never saw any of my dad's stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.
Now I have to have the biggest P.O. box in the entire post office to get all the manuscripts coming in.
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 sold my first short story while I was home on maternity leave, then began working on novels. Since I was reading and enjoying romance novels at the time, the first two unpublished manuscripts I wrote were both romances. I sold my third novel, 'Call After Midnight,' to Harlequin Intrigue after submitting it unagented.
I was born in 1943 at Neston in the Wirral, not far from Liverpool where my father, Richard William Hunt was a lecturer in paleography, the study of mediaeval manuscripts.
