“I have always been jealous of artists. The smell of the studio, the names of the various tools, the look of a half-finished canvas all shout of creation. What do writers have in comparison? Only the flat paper, the clacketing of the typewriter or the scrape of a pen across a yellow page. And then, when the finished piece is presented, there is a small wonder on one hand, a manuscript smudged with erasures or crossed out lines on the other. The impact of the painting is immediate, the manuscript must unfold slowly through time.”

“Carolina removed an old and creased single sheet of paper, yellowed with age, that was now carefully protected in clear, acid-free paper. She handed it to Dara. "This was folded up in a parik-til, in the box with my birth certificate.""A parik-til?" asked Jennifer."It is a small pouch that is filled with things to bring good luck or blessings." She held up the cloth bag and opened it for the girls to see. "Gypsies use them, but so do Native Americans as well as people from Central and South America and other parts of the world. When I got it, I had no idea what it was or what it meant. I knew the folded piece of paper was old and somehow had to be important to me since my birth parents had included it with the other things they wanted me to have." Carolina stood up and walked over to the window. How well she remembered the overwhelming emotions she felt when she first saw those pages of the Voynich Manuscript in the book she was reading, and then realizing that the ancient script was the same as what was on the piece of paper that had been preserved in the parik-til--her parik-til. "Anyway, as soon as I saw the photographs of some of the manuscript pages in the book I was reading, I made the connection immediately. It was the same script as what was on this sheet of paper that I had been given."All three FIGS crowded closely together to look at Carolina's treasure.”

“For writers, handing a manuscript off to an editor is like walking into a parole hearing. You’ve done the time but wonder if it’s going to satisfy the judge.”

“A small brazier glowed near the monk's left hand. On a lecturn before him lay pots of paints, brushes, a quill, a pen, a knife, a sizeable handbell, the tooth of some animal--and a piece of parchment. It was the parchment that commanded the room. Until he saw it Len didn't realize how starved he had been of colour. Villagers dressed in various shades of brown and beige, like their furniture and fields and now, here, was an irruption of the rainbow, as if a charm of goldfinches had landed on the manuscript and been transfixed.”

“Writing is an expression of the writer's own peculiar personality, could not help being so. Yet in reading great works one feels that the finished piece transcends the personal. All writers great and small must sometimes have felt that they have become part of what they wrote even more than it still remains a part of them.”

“A book is finished when it does not want me to work on it any longer...it reaches a point when it feels like it is literally avoiding me. I have a very physical relationship with the manuscript, almost a corps à corps. Paradoxically, when I finally feel at ease with a manuscript, with its voices, I realize it is finished. I see a book as a living organism, with its own rules and will. What matters to me is to allow it to grow and to acquire an existence of its own. It’s as if the book uses me in order to come into existence, rather than being written.”