Noodling Quotes & Sayings

From the time I could play the piano, I remember trying to write tunes. They were in my head, and I would just sit down and start noodling. Next thing I knew, I had written a melody. — Marvin Hamlisch

When Jennifer Roberson and Kate Elliott and I were noodling up 'The Golden Key,' we had pages upon pages upon pages of notes about everything to do with our little universe. Much of this material was used; the rest was there if we needed it. But it all had to be consistent within itself and adhere to its own logic. — Melanie Rawn

Here are some questions I am constantly noodling over: Do you splurge or do you hoard? Do you live every day as if it's your last, or do you save your money on the chance you'll live twenty more years? Is life too short, or is it going to be too long? Do you work as hard as you can, or do you slow down to smell the roses? And where do carbohydrates fit into all this? Are we really all going to spend our last years avoiding bread, especially now that bread in American is so unbelievable delicious? And what about chocolate? — Nora Ephron

I started seriously applying myself to writing fiction immediately after I finished graduate school. By 'seriously,' I mean that, instead of noodling along on a story, finishing it or not as the mood struck me, I set out to complete what I started, to polish it to the best of my ability, and to send out the finished story. — Jane Lindskold

I'm actively going out onto the porch and noodling around on my guitar. — Jemaine Clement

Clearly, unless thinking beings inevitably wipe themselves out soon after developing technology, extraterrestrial intelligence could often be millions or billions of years in advance of us. We're the galaxy's noodling newbies. — Seth Shostak

I don't care what anybody says. Stick to the spirit of the play and you're doing it right. It's about embracing the spirit of the text instead of noodling some idea about things. — Suzan-Lori Parks

I can't take any more white boys noodling around on their guitars. — Gene Ween

My writing process, such as it is, consists of a lot of noodling, procrastinating, dawdling, and avoiding. — Amy Bloom

To think I need a gun to protect against those who'd kill me for being Muslim ... It's too bad they don't know about my true religion of noodling - a reason to get their nuts in a snit. — Manil Suri

A characteristic of creative people is that they imagine making the impossible possible. That imagining - dreaming, noodling, audaciously rejecting what is (for the moment) true - is the way we discover what is new or important. — Ed Catmull

I just finished a novel, and I'm back kind of noodling on the screenplays. Screenplays are tough. I am making music, I'm just not sure what kind of music it is or where it's going. — Michael Nesmith

I spent nine hard, exasperating, concentrated months on the first chapter of Liars' Club alone, which was essentially time developing that voice - a watchmaker's minuscule efforts, noodling with syntax and diction. Were I to add on the time I spent trying to recount that book's events in poetry and a novel, I could argue that concocting that mode of speech actually occupied some thirteen years (seventeen, if you count the requisite years in therapy getting the nerve up). What was I doing during those nine months? Mostly I just shoved words around the page. I'd get up at four or five when my son was asleep, then work. I'd try telling something one way, then another. If a paragraph seemed half decent, I'd cut it out and tape it to the wall. — Mary Karr

Each acoustic guitar has its own character and personality. On a particular day, I might pick one up and start noodling around, looking for some emotional content in the chords. — Neil Diamond

Writing music uses a whole different process that involves a lot of noodling and just seeing what comes. — Charles De Lint

Most people learn to improvise on their own, listening to records, endless hours of noodling on their instrument in the bedroom with all their spare time. That's traditionally how people learn. — Gary Burton

Sometimes you're noodling around with a sketch and something incongruous in the drawing calls forth the caption and other times you think of a line and just have to find a place for it. A cartoon with a caption like "I don't want to live forever, but I sure as hell don't want to be dead forever either" sprang into my head and I just had to find the right venue for it which was an old couple talking to each other. — Robert Mankoff

I heard what I'd learned against my will to identify as new age music. Aimless and spacey, it meandered from unresolved keyboard chord to unresolved keyboard chord with some somnolent noodling in place of melody. Drooling pianos, music to sleepwalk by. — Timothy Hallinan