“This was a manuscript of the night we couldn’t read.”

“Marchand dreams that in one magical and endless night the rejected manuscripts make love every way possible with his abandoned manuscript: they sodomize it, rape it orally and genitally, come in its hair, on its body, in its ears, in its armpits, etc., but when morning comes, his manuscript hasn't been fertilized. It's sterile. In that sterility, Marchand believes, lies its uniqueness, its magnetism.”

“How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses, and enthralls us? It is a miracle. We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.”

“Our life is a book to which we add daily, until suddenly we are finished, and then the manuscript is burned.”

“Turning a manuscript into a book is easy; getting the manuscript ready to become a book is hard.”

“You know your heart and soul are stapled to that manuscript, but what we see are the words on the paper”