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.

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

Cut your manuscript ruthlessly but never throw anything away: it's amazing how often a discarded scene or description, which wouldn't fit in one place, will work perfectly later.

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.

The world was her manuscript. No surface was safe.

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.

I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths.

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.

Your manuscript is both good and original but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.

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 thought it was amazing to work with authors to get a manuscript and try to make up a cover for it.

As an editor I read Charlotte Rogan's amazing debut novel 'The Lifeboat ' when it was still in manuscript. I read it in one night and I really wanted my company to publish it but we lost it to another house. It's such a wonderful combination of beautiful writing and suspenseful storytelling.