Making Notes Quotes & Sayings

My writing process is such that a story will be in my head for awhile, and I'll start making notes on my computer. I create character sheets that include a character's past, fears, goals and ambitions. — Tracie Peterson

Did you have a rough month? I did :( but, you know what? There's no time to dwell on a missed opportunity or worry about what I should've done or said, beating myself up & making myself miserable about my mistakes. That doesn't work. So will take notes from that, put it behind me, move on & finish the year STRONG — Pablo

I was always into staying busy, into my goals, into making notes and planning. I'm not one who truly lives in the past. — Richard Simmons

However, James and Aamir did not discuss their astounding box office grosses or formulas for success.Instead, they exchanged notes on the process of film-making; how ideas, even seemingly crazy ones that require developing a unique camera, as James did for Avatar, become a reality; how stories and not special effects are the heartbeat of movies. — Anupama Chopra

I have ideas every day, and if I'm not carrying a pad of paper, I'm typing it into the notes thing on my iPhone, and it's just ridiculous - idle hands are the devil's plaything, and I can't be the devil's plaything. I got to be the devil; I got to be the guy making it all happen. — Corey Taylor

Second, this was an idea championed by those at the highest levels of the company. Had the enormous task of making Notes Day a reality been shunted off on someone who didn't have the clout to throw muscle behind it - and not entrusted to Tom, who in turn recruited the most organized people in the company to help him - it would have been an entirely different experience. Employees wouldn't have bought into the idea because they'd sense that management hadn't, either. And that would have rendered Notes Day moot. — Ed Catmull

In the movies I've done for Sony, they've never given me quadrant specific notes ever. They say "Keep making it. Just make the movie you want to do." Especially in a comedy because comedy is so tone specific. — Will Gluck

Ideas can come from anywhere and at any time. The problem with making mental notes is that the ink fades very rapidly. — Rolf Smith

There's a huge amount of work that goes into placating a network in regular television. It's literally 70% or 80% of your workload, is showing them the material, getting their notes and presenting it to them and making sure they weigh in. It's a huge amount of work. — Louis C.K.

I think I have a habit of, in my head, taking notes on whatever, you know, whether they're verbal or pictorial or just making a note of things as they're happening. — Roz Chast

Impressive vocabulary," Korbyn said. "I feel as though I should take notes."
"I think she's making them up," Liyana said. "Half of them are not anatomically possible. — Sarah Beth Durst

There's something mathematically satisfying about music: notes fit together and harmony and all that. And mathematics has to do with abstractions and making connections. — Tom Lehrer

He was making music - Howells, Finzi, Holst - so you could see the sounds in the serried air.
Serried. Then just as suddenly empty when his sound-proof right hand closed off the notes. — Craig Raine

I am always making sketches of how information should look or mapping out a marketing campaign. When I present my notes, people start responding to them. Desktop publishing makes everything look slick. When you present sketches, it helps start the dialogue and collaboration. — John Katzman

This Land is mostly white space on the map ... which is how it should be; I'll leave more detailed map making to those graduate students and English teachers who feel that every goose which lays gold must be dissected so that all of its quite ordinary guts can be labelled; to those figurative engineers of the imagination who cannot feel comfortable with the comfortably overgrown (and possible dangerous) literary wilderness until they have built a freeway composed of Cliff's Notes through it - and listen to me, you people: every English teacher who ever did a Monarch or Cliff's Notes ought to be dragged out to his or her quad, drawn and quartered, then cut up into tiny pieces, said pieces to be dried and shrunk in the sun and then sold in the college bookstore as bookmarks. — Stephen King

The criticism is that it's too simple, but my feeling is it's more of a challenge making someone feel an emotion in four notes than in 25 notes. — Kenny G

Was this what he believed, what he had always believed when I talked on and on about goodness? Was he making the violin say it? Was he deliberately creating those long, pure liquid notes to say that beauty meant nothing because it came from the dispair inside him, and it had nothing to do with the desair finally, because the despair wasn't beautiful, and a beauty then was a horrid irony? — Anne Rice

Much of the day I have busied myself making notes on the small parts in Shakespeare, often nameless, which are rewarding to the actor if only he'll not dismiss them as beneath his dignity. If I can work it up into a talk I might call it, 'Only a cough and a spit ' -the phrase so often used by actors to explain away a lack of opportunity. — Alec Guinness

The diversity in the human family should be the cause of love and harmony, as it is in music where many different notes blend together in the making of a perfect chord. — Abdu'l- Baha

That's why we all hate 'em, he thought. Those expressionless eyes watch us, those big faces turn to follow us, and doesn't it just look as if they're making notes and taking names? If you heard that one had bashed in someone's head over in Quirm or somewhere, wouldn't you just love to believe it? A voice inside, a voice which generally came to him only in the quiet hours of the night or, in the old days, half-way down a whiskey bottle, added: Given how we use them, maybe we're scared because we know we deserve it ... — Terry Pratchett

When I am reading for research and making notes, I use a cleverly designed curved lap-desk, and I sit up dutifully, mindful of ergonomics and suchlike concepts. When reading for pleasure, I take advantage of the 'recline' in recliner. — Guy Gavriel Kay

I take editing seriously. It's a joy to edit. I always hand a manuscript to several editors and can't wait to get back their notes and see what they've said. I don't criticize myself for making blunders here and there, because it's just natural. You write in chunks, and you may not remember that that sentence you wrote yesterday had the same word repeated three times. I do enjoy that. I love the feeling of repairing. Repairing is really nice. — Steve Martin

I tend to be pretty efficient with my time. I work on a novel for four to five hours a day, and then the rest of my day is spent doing other things, whether it's spending time with my family, or going through and making notes on the script, or working on the marketing. It's just a matter of scheduling. — Nicholas Sparks

I don't understand. I don't. How can the same guy who took those photos of me and wrote those notes to me be making out with another girl on the other side of this door? — Jandy Nelson

Work is not just an activity that generates funds and creates desire; it's the vagabonding gestation period, wherein you earn your integrity, start making plans, and get your proverbial act together. Work is a time to dream about travel and write notes to yourself, but it's also the time to tie up your loose ends. Work is when you confront the problems you might otherwise be tempted to run away from. Work is how you settle your financial and emotional debts - so that your travels are not an escape from your real life but a discovery of your real life. — Rolf Potts

What you really have to know is one: yourself. And the only way you can know that one is in the mirror of the others. And the only way you can see into the mirror of the others is by love or its opposite - by profound emotion. Certainly not by curiosity - by dancing around asking, looking, making notes. You have to live relationships to know. — Archibald MacLeish

Notes Day wasn't an end point but a beginning - a way of making room for our employees to step forward and think about their role in our company's future. I said before that problems are easy to identify, but finding the source of those problems is extraordinarily difficult. Notes brought problems to the surface - but we still had the hard work in front of us. Notes Day didn't solve anything all by itself. But it shifted our culture - repaired it, even - in ways that will make us better as we go forward. — Ed Catmull

Get up and make notes on the books that you have, reflect on these notes and order more books, get up again, revise the hypothesis, and figure out a new plan of action. Repeat, making sure to leave no cracks open through which the gray fog of depression can penetrate. I — Barbara Ehrenreich

I'm always writing; I'm always jotting things down on paper or making notes in my iPhone. Then I'll make myself sit down and kind of shape it up, but there's really no other way to practice other than onstage. — Sarah Silverman

I'm not quite sure. Probably because "Hanky Panky" and "I Think We're Alone Now" had more to do with it than anything else. For some reason, staccato eighth notes on a bass sounded like bubblegum. Basically, groups like the 1910 Fruitgum Co. took my early format and kind of perverted it, and made these mindless pre-fab hits over and over. In the 60s, anybody who was making commercial music, that is music that didn't have a political slant to it, or wasn't taking drugs, was bubblegum. And that term kind of hung on a lot of people back then, and it's unfortunate. — Tommy James

When you are making a record and if you spend too much time over it, you have to record it a tone lower or cut the tones lower because you can't reach some of the notes, I find this. But when you go on stage, you have to put the key up and it really changes the whole thing. — Ray Davies

I made a mental note to write starlings in my "Southern Speak" notebook. I'd already started the second page, thanks to Faye and Bobbie. One corner of his mouth turned up in a smile. "I try. So, Churchville. Let me see the map."
I followed his directions, asking questions, until he drew a big circle around the funeral home. "That's it right there, just off 42. Or Buffalo Gap Highway. But you might not see any road signs. Out there things are a little...well, less posted. People just sort of know where they are. So look for these things." He drew in some more notes and--I'm not making this up--something like bugs with stick legs.
"What are those?" I asked, not intending to sound rude. "Roaches?"
"Those are cows. There's a pasture here."
"Oh. — Jennifer Rogers Spinola

I [who] am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement ... — Virginia Woolf

There is more value in placing a flower in a rifle barrel than making war. As Jimi Hendrix used to say, musical notes have more importance than bullets. — Carlos Santana

Last semester was intense," I said to Dad.

"Intense?" he echoed, picking up my file. "Let's see. On your first day at Hecate, you were attacked by a werewolf. You insulted a teacher, which resulted in semester-long cellar duty with one Archer Cross. According to the notes, the two of you became 'close.' Apparently close enough for you to see the mark of L'Occhio di Dio on his chest.

I flushed at that, and felt Mom's arm tighten around me. Over the past six months, I'd filled her in on a lot of the story with Archer, but not all of it.

Specifically, the whole me-making-out-in-the-cellar-with-a-murderous-warlock-working-with-the-Eye-part. — Rachel Hawkins

I've never written one note or word of music simply because I think it will make money. — Brian Wilson

I suppose in reality not a leaf goes yellow in autumn without ceasing to care about its sap and making the parent tree very uncomfortable by long growling and grumbling - but surely nature might find some less irritating way of carrying on business if she would give her mind to it. Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the sphex wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow, but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before it began to live consciously on its own account? — Samuel Butler

Every reporter inhales skepticism. You interview people, and they lie. You face public figures, diligently making notes or taping what is said, and they perform their interviews to fit a calculated script. The truth, alas, is always elusive. — Pete Hamill

I revise my suicide plan to slow death by morphling. I will become a yellow-skinned bag of bones, with enormous eyes. I'm a couple of days into the plan, making good progress, when something unexpected happens. I begin to sing. At the window, in the shower, in my sleep. Hour after hour of ballads, love songs, mountain airs. All the songs my father taught me before he died, for certainly there has been very little music in my life since. What's amazing is how clearly I remember them. The tunes, the lyrics. My voice, at first rough and breaking on the high notes, warms up into something splendid. A voice that would make the mockingjays fall silent and then tumble over themselves to join in. Days pass, weeks. I watch the snows fall on the ledge outside my window. And in all that time, mine is the only voice I hear. What — Suzanne Collins

The love-making of the bluebird is as beautiful as the bird itself, and normally as gentle, unless interrupted by some jealous rival who would steal his bride; then gentleness gives place to active combat. The male usually arrives a few days ahead of the female, selects what he considers to be a suitable summer home, and carols his sweetest, most seductive notes day after day until she appears in answer to his call. — Arthur Cleveland Bent

She remembers the last perfect evening before everything happened, perfect even though she didn't know everything was about to change. Karaoke night. A bunch of kids from choir cheering each other on. When it was her turn, Hallelujah belted out "Total Eclipse of the Heart." She went for every melodramatic note, closing her eyes and beating her chest. She got the whole group to sing along.
She remembers Jonah taking the stage next. When he sang the opening lines to Garth Brooks's "Friends in Low Places," the room went nuts. He put on a cowboy drawl and sent the low notes reverberating through the wooden floorboards. She remembers him tipping an imaginary Stetson at her when he was done.
In a week, Hallelujah would get caught making out with Luke Willis. He would humiliate her and start spreading lies about her. She would become someone quiet and sad and resentful. But right then, performance-flushed and surrounded by friends, she couldn't stop smiling. — Kathryn Holmes

Egerton taught her how to approach a challenging book. She should read and reread slowly, making marginal notes when she came across something important, and mark things she didn't understand. He instructed her to think over each evening what she had read that day and jot down her ideas about it. She was a willing and eager pupil — Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge

With God's help, I've not had a drink in nine and a half years. That's my whole story right there. And because of that, I'm doing this. I'm making records, I'm touring. I was so involved in just getting brain damaged, I wasn't doing anything. I had great ideas, many notebooks filled with notes, some of them I can read and some of them I just can't read, but I really didn't do anything constructive, it was all just good ideas. Now I'm trying to lead a constructive life a day at a time. — Ringo Starr

Did you look at the memo?"
"What memo? We're getting memos now?"
"I sent a memo a week ago. I've been sending you a memo every week with a list of all the updates and my notes on all our cases for weeks now."
Holy cow. Missed the boat on that one. "Oh, those memos. I totally knew that."
"You're not even reading them, are you?"
"I thought they were optional."
Note to self: Stop making paper airplanes out of Cookie's memos. — Darynda Jones

As we joined the line of people getting off at the last stop before Sofia, I looked once more at the little boy, whom I felt I would never forget, though maybe it wasn't exactly him I would remember, I thought, but the use I would make of him. I had my notes, I knew I would write a poem about him, and then it would be the poem I remembered, which would be both true and false at once, the image I made replacing the real image. Making poems was a way of loving things, I had always thought, of preserving them, of living moments twice; or more than that, it was a way of living more fully, of bestowing on experience a richer meaning. But that wasn't what it felt like when I looked back at the boy, wanting a last glimpse of him; it felt like a loss. Whatever I could make of him would diminish him, and I wondered whether I wasn't really turning my back on things in making them into poems, whether instead of preserving the world I was taking refuge from it. — Garth Greenwell

For the individual, as I can testify, a brief grounding in semantics, besides making philosophy unreadable, makes unreadable most political speeches, classical economic theory, after-dinner oratory, diplomatic notes, newspaper editorials, treatises on pedagogics and education, expert financial comment, dissertations on money and credit, accounts of debates, and Great Thoughts from Great Thinkers in general. You would be surprised at the amount of time this saves. — Stuart Chase

When you're making a film, there are so many people involved that you get opinions and notes from people and you don't even know who they are. I find that quite difficult and it wears you down. — Nick Cave

You have to make your own condensed notes. You learn from MAKING them. A lot of thinking goes into deciding what to include and exclude. You develop your own system of abbreviations and memory methods for the information. — Peter Rogers

Get your sticky fingers away from my cookies," Ben ordered, without turning his head, to see Jaxton trying to steal one from the cooking tray.
"You weren't saying that last night," Jaxton retaliated, coming up to Ben's side, to give him a nudge. They were both smiling, while looking down at the counter, where Ben was making his delicious rosemary cookies. "In fact, I seem to remember you grabbing my sticky fingers and putting them in your mouth," he teased, speaking quietly, so that Lyon wouldn't hear them at the other side of the room.
Ben turned to Jaxton and abandoned his baking, to catch his face in flour covered hands and plant a deep kiss on his lips.
Jaxton opened his mouth, in acceptance of his kiss.

~ From the Heart — Elaine White

Home in Ireland, I went to Collins Barracks and spent some time wandering around, making notes on the various guns, knives and swords. — Sarah Rees Brennan

The masculine voice was low but clear, capturing the senses, running along the back of her neck like a caress, making her shiver in delight. Artemis very much feared she was gaping. The Duke of Wakefield had a voice to make angels - or devils - weep. It wasn't the type of male voice currently admired - for the high, unnatural voice of the musico was the rage of London at the moment - but his was the sort of voice that would always seduce the ear. Sure and strong, with a vibrating masculinity on the low notes. She could sit and listen to a voice like this for hours. — Elizabeth Hoyt

I know vaudeville isn't supposed to be art. It's supposed to be entertainment, which is different. But I think art ... I think it's making something from nothing, basically. It's taking something as simple as movement, or a few notes, or steps, or words, and putting them all together so that they're bigger than what they ever could have been separate. They're transformed. And just witnessing that transformation changes you. It reaches into your insides and moves things around. It's magic, of a sort.
I never really knew that until I saw your act. But when you walked out on that stage, I knew I was seeing something ... different. Something maybe more amazing than what the professor and Silenus had done. You were making something up there, out of just the simplest elements possible, and seeing it changed something in me. I'd never encountered anything like that. — Robert Jackson Bennett

It's impossible to play a run with as much feeling as a single note. I've never been so much into runs as making single notes cry. — Robin Trower

For me, travelling and drawing the world, experiencing as much as possible first hand, has been very important. Making notes, drawing and writing on the move, became second nature. — Michael Foreman

No! Oh, my God, stop going for my nipples!" Aidan screamed, hitting all the high notes and making Lucifer shake his head in disgust as he reluctantly got up and headed for the living room where all the screaming was coming from. — R.L. Mathewson

In the office, Michael sat behind our father's desk, clicking away at the computer with his right hand, and making notes with his left. Ambidextrous freak. — Rachel Vincent

I generalized rashly: That is what kills political writing, this absurd pretence that you are delivering a great utterance. You never do. You are just a puzzled man making notes about what you think. You are not building the Pantheon, then why act like a graven image? You are drawing sketches in the sand which the sea will wash away. — Walter Lippmann

As an actor I suppose you're constantly observing. I don't sit in restaurants making notes, I don't live my life in order to then feed it into my work. — Cate Blanchett

You have to be very cautious that you're hitting the right beats and making sure it's funny, but at the same time when those notes are serious, you're trying to get your point across and it's not about the comedy. — LeToya Luckett

That's what it is that you rehearse - the making of music, not the playing of notes as abstractions. — Sarah Caldwell

Let no one read my principles who is not a mathematician," he famously declared (less famous is the fact that the principles he was referring to were his theories of how the aortic pulmonary valve worked). Ironically, he himself was a poor mathematician, often making simple mistakes. In one of his notes he counted up his growing library: "25 small books, 2 larger books, 16 still larger, 6 bound in vellum, 1 book with green chamois cover." This reckoning (with its charmingly haphazard system of classification) adds up to fifty, but Leonardo reached a different sum: "Total: 48," he confidently declared. — Ross King

They returned to the gallery and circled its rim, then went down a short hall. Scrap's tail twitched angrily when they reached Tristan's door: it was shut. Daine grabbed the knob. It stung her hand, making her yelp. "Kit? This ones magicked. Can you do anything?"
Kitten stood on her hind feet and peered into the lock, then whistled two cheerful notes. Nothing happened. She scowled and whistled again, less cheerfully, more as a demand. Nothing happened.
Daine was trying to decide what to do now when the dragon moved back and croaked. The lock popped from the wood to land at Daine's feet, smoking, and the door swung open. Kitten muttered darkly and kicked the lock mechanism aside as she went in. Daine followed, trying not to laugh. — Tamora Pierce

Donald Trump is still hitting all the same notes. He's making the sale. We're hearing from his aides at every event. — Don Gonyea

She had learned in her girlhood to fondle and cherish those long sinuous phrases of Chopin, so free, so flexible, so tactile, which begin by reaching out and exploring far outside and away from the direction in which they started, far beyond the point which one might have expected their notes to reach, and which divert themselves in those byways of fantasy only to return more deliberately - with a more premeditated reprise, with more precision, as on a crystal bowl that reverberates to the point of making you cry out - to strike at your heart. Brought — Marcel Proust

I looked at this first sheet, words scribbled confidently on a lined pad. My attempt at making contact the spirit of Llandor. Disaster. I couldn't do the language or locate the period. The pad of paper, with its grey-mauve rules, was all wrong. It was intended for meaningful work, figures, calculations, notes. — Iain Sinclair

When I start on a book, I have been thinking about it and making occasional notes for some time ... So I have lots of theme, locale, subjects and technical ideas ... I don't worry about long periods of not doing anything. I know my subconscious is busy. — Arthur C. Clarke

Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts. — Rebecca Solnit

Bel dames spent most of their time running after criminals in dingy, unfiltered cities, making enemies with other bel dames whose notes they stole, girlfriends they fucked, and sons they killed. — Kameron Hurley

He was flying over India now, still making notes. He remembered hearing an Indian politician on TV talking about the British prime minister and being unable to pronounce her name properly. "Mrs. Torture," he kept saying. "Mrs. Margaret Torture." This was unaccountably funny. — Salman Rushdie

Paul has more, I think, of a feel for the stage. Whereas I have it more for the notes themselves. I love record making and mixing, arranging, producing. That I love. I love to make beautiful things, but I don't like to perform. — Art Garfunkel

If I get blocked, it is generally because I don't know enough about some aspect of the story or the characters. The answer for this is generally more research, or making more background notes, so the place and person can be more fully realized inside my own mind. — Sarah Zettel

I don't sing operatically, and I sing very intimately, but I still do the scales, and I think in terms of intonation and making sure that I'm hitting the notes right on the head ... and having it appear quite effortless. — Tony Bennett

Making a painting is like playing the saxophone. You hit the note and it comes out. — Julian Schnabel

Never talk to waiters like that," Kit said.
"Can I help it," he said, "if I only went one year to finishing school?"
"It isn't manners," she said like a sensible schoolteacher quietly disciplining a small boy, "it just isn't smart."
I thought of the time I first told him not to say ain't. He took this the same way, a little peeved but making mental notes. I noticed he was never too much of an egotist to take criticism when he knew it would help. It was part of his genius for self-propulsion. I was beginning to see what Kit had for Sammy. Of course she stood for something never within his reach before. But it was more than that. Sammy seemed to know that his career was entering a new cycle where polish paid off. You could almost see him filing off the rough edges against the sharp blade of her mind. — Budd Schulberg