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.
Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.
When the adversaries of Erasmus had got the Trinity into his edition, they threw by their manuscript as an old almanac out of date.
All writing seems to me worse in the state of proof than in any other form. In manuscript one's own wisdom is rather remarkable to one, but in proof it has the effect of one's private furniture repeated in the shop windows. And then there is the sense that the worst errors will go to press unnoticed!
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.
You should be writing for the love of the story, and when it comes time to return to the manuscript, everything else belongs behind a closed door.
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.
Novels are completed when they are finished, but the memoir changes its own conclusion by virtue of being written. . . I was not at all the same person, when I handed the manuscript to the publisher, as I had been when I began. A memoir may always be retrospective, but the past is not where its action takes place.
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 trying to rewrite it.
I am the luckiest novelist in the world. I was a first-time novelist who wasn't awash in rejection slips, whose manuscript didn't disappear in slush piles. I have had a wonderful time.
I thought it was amazing to work with authors, to get a manuscript and try to make up a cover for it.
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.
This was a manuscript of the night we couldn’t read.
The manuscript may go forth from the writer to return with a faithfulness passing the faithfulness of the boomerang or the homing pigeon.
It is not as easy to emigrate with steel mills as it is with the manuscript of a novel.
The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.
A manuscript not submitted is a book not published.
I have an office in my house, with a comfy red print reading chair and a soft cream-colored desk. After I walk Winston the Wonder dog and have my breakfast, I head to my office. Every single day. Sometimes, when I'm working on revisions, I print off my manuscript and go to a coffee shop to work. But mostly you can find me in my office.
I became a connoisseur of that nasty thud a manuscript makes when it comes through the letter box.
But when I say it isn't meant for anyone's eyes, I don't mean it in the sense of one of those novel manuscripts people keep in a drawer, insisting they don't care if anyone else ever reads it or not. The people I have known who do that, I am convinced, have no faith in themselves as writers and know, deep down, that the novel is flawed, that they don't know how to tell the story, or they don't understand what the story is, or they haven't really got a story to tell. The manuscript in the drawer is the story.
