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.

Stanley B. Prusiner

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I've seen unpublished manuscripts where the writer doesn't know they are making fun of the villain - but they are.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