Quoting Yourself
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I am editing a book for a writer who has quotes at the beginning of each chapter. The first chapter has a quote of her own. It's weird, but it's what she wants. Do I just treat it like the other quotes with her own name after it?
Is this something people do in their own books?
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1 answer
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You have two choices:
- Write it up in the same style as the other quotes but don't give an attribution. It is common enough for writers to put something poetic or otherwise different from the main chapter text in the beginning of a chapter.
- Give a full citation, including the name of the work it came from. If it's unpublished, then it's just the author writing the book. If it's been published before, then it's reasonable to say where it came from. I don't think it will look strange if it's a quote from another one of her books.
The third choice is to do it however she chooses and just let the publisher deal with it (if she's not self-publishing). I think either of those options will work. The one thing I would not do is to attribute the quote to the author without saying where it is from. That would be really odd.
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