“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 story's narrator, that I was remembering something, not making it up.”
Chris Van Allsburg
“Publishing is no longer simply a matter of picking worthy manuscripts and putting them on offer. It is now as important to market books properly, to work with the bookstore chains to get terms, co-op advertising, and the like. The difficulty is that publishers who can market are most often not the publishers with worthy lists.”
Olivia Goldsmith
“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
“Most of the untranscribed and unpublished manuscripts in the book popped out of boxes at me when I wasn't looking for them; I picked them up out of the corner of my eye.”
Robert Hughes
“The manuscript was so brittle, it would crumble at the slightest touch.”
Rodolphe Kasser
“They blame him now for having frozen the manuscripts. It made them crumble all the worse.”
James Robinson
“In 1987 or '88, Etienne and Nadine came with a manuscript, ... It was all handwritten, with illustrations by Nadine. They asked if I would set it to music.”
Roger Waters
