80 Manuscript Quotes
Following is our list of manuscript quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about .
Quick Jump To
Famous Manuscript Quotes
Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure. — Oliver Herford
One writer, for instance, excels at a plan or a title page, another works away at the body of the book, and a third is a dab at an index. — Oliver Goldsmith
Handwriting is civilization's casual encephalogram. — Lance Morrow
Every man is a diary in which he writes one story while intending to write another. His humblest moment is when he compares the two — Hugh B. Brown
A book calls for pen, ink, and a writing desk; today the rule is that pen, ink, and a writing desk call for a book. — Friedrich Nietzsche
Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text. — Walter Benjamin
The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it. — John M. Barrie
I am my own secretary; I dictate, I compose, I copy all myself. — Venerable Bede
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven. — Walter Benjamin
We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship. — George Wald
I'm a little pencil in the hand of a writing God, who is sending a love letter to the world. — Mother Teresa
The moving finger writes; and having writ, moves on. — Omar Khayyam
You do it a day at a time. You write as well as you can, you put it in the mail, you leave it under submission, you never leave it at home. — James Lee Burke
I am nothing; I am but an instrument, a tiny pencil in the hands of the Lord with which He writes what he likes. However imperfect we are, he writes beautifully. — Mother Teresa
Every artist writes his own autobiography. — Havelock Ellis
Short Manuscript Quotes
- The Rift, which was well over a thousand pages of manuscript, took two years. — Walter Jon Williams
- Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home. — John W. Campbell
- I became a connoisseur of that nasty thud a manuscript makes when it comes through the letter box. — James Herriot
- I keep working under the delusion that someday a library will ask for my manuscripts. — Walter Wager
- I never saw any of my dad's stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts. — Stephen King
- Agents are essential, because publishers will not read unsolicited manuscripts. — Jackie Collins
- The real reason Milton went blind was to avoid reading unsolicited manuscripts. — Rita Mae Brown
- Manuscripts don't burn. — Mikhail Bulgakov
- manuscripts don't burn - (рукописи не горят) — Mikhail Bulgakov
- Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place. — Margaret Haddix
Good Manuscript Quotes
Good designers are no longer satisfied in taking the manuscript from someone and making it look nice. One of the things that I've tried to do is move from being a designer to a content provider. — Tibor Kalman
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. — Marilyn Hacker
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. — Samuel Johnson
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. — Ring Lardner
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. — Chuck Klosterman
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. — Katherine Dunham
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! — David Herbert Donald
I don't want to be the one to tell somebody, You will not make it, even though I know that the majority of those who come to me with their manuscripts are not really good enough. — Chinua Achebe
When I was in England, I had seen advertisements about typing agencies; I had learned that if you really want to make a good impression, you should have your manuscript well typed. — Chinua Achebe
A good deal of editing a manuscript looks like mechanical work, as if anyone with time on their hands and a magnifying glass could do it. But at a certain point, you need a strong interpretive conviction and, as you say, an "intangible" relationship to what you are doing. — Oliver Harris
People Writing About Manuscript
| Name | Quotes | Likes |
|---|---|---|
 Walter Benjamin |
143 | 1292 |
 Mother Teresa |
852 | 24671 |
 Mikhail Bulgakov |
77 | 1072 |
 Oliver Herford |
30 | 516 |
 Oliver Goldsmith |
345 | 2129 |
 Lance Morrow |
31 | 234 |
More Manuscript Quotes
Do you know what you are? You are a manuscript oƒ a divine letter. You are a mirror reflecting a noble face. This universe is not outside of you. Look inside yourself; everything that you want, you are already that. — Rumi
You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls . — Merce Cunningham
Lets replace all references in manuscripts with DOIs & eliminate the tyranny of reference formatting. — Lee Cronin
To visit Morocco is still like turning the pages of some illuminated Persian manuscript all embroidered with bright shapes and subtle lines. — Edith Wharton
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. — Akira Toriyama
I say that I've never been late with a manuscript, but I don't mean to be arrogant; it's that I simply want to get it done as soon as possible so I can be set free. — Akira Toriyama
Seek wisdom in books, rare manuscripts, and cryptic poems if you will, but seek it out also in simple stones, and fragile herbs, and in the cries of wild birds. Listen to the whisperings of the wind and the roar of water if you would discover magic, for it is here that the old secrets are preserved. — Scott Cunningham
There is never finality in the display terminal's screen, but an irresponsible whimsicality, as words, sentences, and paragraphs are negated at the touch of a key. The significance of the past, as expressed in the manuscript by a deleted word or an inserted correction, is annulled in idle gusts of electronic massacre. — Alexander Cockburn
I began writing 'Matterhorn' in 1975 and for more than 30 years I kept working on my novel in my spare time, unable to get an agent or publisher to even read the manuscript. — Karl Marlantes
The Polar Express was the easiest of my picture book manuscripts to write... Once I realized the train was going to the North Pole, finding the story seemed less like a creative effort than an act of recollection. I felt, like the storys narrator, that I was remembering something, not making it up. — Chris Van Allsburg
There is great exhilaration in breaking one of these things. ... Ramanujan gives no hints, no proof of his formulas, so everything you do you feel is your own.[About verifying Ramanujan's equations in a newly found manuscript.] — George Andrews
Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it - whole-heartedly - and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings. — Arthur Quiller-Couch
The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home. — John Y. Campbell
In fact, most of the changes found in early Christian manuscripts have nothing to do with theology or ideology. Far and away the most changes are the result of mistakes pure and simple slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders of one sort or another. — Bart D. Ehrman
The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript. — Aleister Crowley
If you invent two or three people and turn them loose in your manuscript, something is bound to happen to them -- you can't help it; and then it will take you the rest of the book to get them out of the natural consequences of that occurrence, and so first thing you know, there's your book all finished up and never cost you an idea. — Mark Twain
Creativity runs across many categories in life, from the arts-and-crafts project a mum or dad does with their kids, to the bestselling author's manuscript, to the designs of the hairdresser, to the creations of the computer programming genius. — Tabatha Coffey
Today there survives more than 25,0000 partial and complete, ancient handwritten manuscript copies of the New Testament. These hand written manuscripts have allowed scholars and textual critics to go back and verify that the Bible we have in our possession today is the same Bible that the early church possessed 2,000 years ago. — Charlie Campbell
Children ask better questions than adults. "May I have a cookie?" "Why is the sky blue?" and "What does a cow say?" are far more likely to elicit a cheerful response than "Where's your manuscript?" "Why haven't you called?" and "Who's your lawyer?" — Fran Lebowitz
The inerrancy of Scripture means that scripture in the original manuscripts does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact. — Wayne Grudem
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. — Tanith Lee
You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist. — Isaac Asimov
Well, certainly the Voynich Manuscript is the 'limit text' of Western occultism. No one can read it. It is truly an occult book. — Terence McKenna
Why am I obsessed with the idea I can justify myself by getting manuscripts published? Is it an escape-an excuse for any social failure-so I can say "No, I don't go out for many extracurricular activities, but I spend a lot of time writing." — Sylvia Plath
If Elmore Leonard met Jim Thompson down a dark alley at midnight they might emerge a week later with thick beards, bloodshot eyes and the manuscript for THE BIG O. — Eoin Colfer
Books are like your children. They take nine months to write; the manuscript weighs six pounds and...you send them out into the world and hope that some day they'll send back money. — Edna Buchanan
He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odor, its form, its title. What he loved in a manuscript was its old illegible date, the bizarre and strange Gothic characters, the heavy gilding which loaded its drawings. It was its pages covered with dust — dust of which he breathed the sweet and tender perfume with delight. — Gustave Flaubert
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
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. — Tobias Wolff
This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don't consider it rejected. Consider that you've addressed it 'to the editor who can appreciate my work' and it has simply come back stamped 'Not at this address'. Just keep looking for the right address. — Barbara Kingsolver
What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish. — Thomas Wolfe
When the adversaries of Erasmus had got the Trinity into his edition, they threw by their manuscript as an old almanac out of date. — Isaac Newton
I wanted to write something visual that I could read to the children. This was when I created the idea of Redwall Abbey in my imagination. As I wrote, the idea grew, and the manuscript along with it. — Brian Jacques
I pulled out the manuscript [from the envelope] and a great big stiff cardboard finger sprung up. This is someone that was so certain they would be rejected, they would be getting their revenge in advance. I was lucky - it could have been a pipe bomb. — Gardner Dozois
Anyone who has invented a better mousetrap, or the contemporary equivalent, can expect to be harassed by strangers demanding that you read their unpublished manuscripts or undergo the humiliation of public speaking, usually on remote Midwestern campuses. — Barbara Ehrenreich
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. — Nicholas Sparks
Now I have to have the biggest P.O. box in the entire post office to get all the manuscripts coming in. — Susie Bright
In Conclusion
Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of manuscript quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about manuscript to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of manuscript quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.
Embed HTML Link
Copy and paste this HTML code in your webpage