Notebooks With Quotes & Sayings

A writer will write with or without a movement; but at the same time, for Chicano, lesbian, gay and feminist writers-anybody writing against the grain of Anglo misogynist culture-political movements are what have allowed our writing to surface from the secret places in our notebooks into the public sphere. — Cherrie Moraga

Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss. — Joan Didion

At one time I used to keep notebooks with outlines for stories. But I found doing this somehow deadened the idea in my imagination. If the notion is good enough, if it truly belongs to you, then you can't forget it-it will haunt you till it's written. — Truman Capote

In the course of writing 'First Light,' I climbed all over and through the Hale Telescope, where I found rooms, stairways, tunnels, and abandoned machines leaking oil. My notebooks show tooth-marks where I gripped them with my teeth while climbing around inside the telescope, and the notebooks are stained with Flying Horse telescope oil. — Richard Preston

I rummaged through the drawers in search of a strong poison. I thought of nothing as I looked; I had to get it over with as quickly as possible. It was as if it were an everyday task I needed to do.
All I could find were things of no use to me: buttons, string, thread of various colors, notebooks - all strongly redolent of naphthalene and none capable of causing a man's death. Buttons, thread, and string - that is what the world contained at this most tragic of moments. — Max Blecher

What comics sacrifice and what lives they live - I know that most of their lives, their adult lives, they're sitting around or walking around with notebooks, writing things down. Usually they're fairly sensitive. Usually they're very bright. And that makes them poets. — Marc Maron

In America: each year the day before school after summer vacation I sat on my bed touching my notebooks, pencils, ruler-holding the stern and sweet smelling brown oxfords in my lap and spreading my skirt and blouse and underwear and socks before me. My mother would come in and always say the same thing: "Free paper burn now."
Such words conspire to make a past.
Such words conjure a knowledge.
Such words make assimilation impossible. They stay with you for years. They puzzle but you sense a significance. I need these words. — Michelle Cliff

I was filling entire school notebooks with stories by Grade 3. Of course, they were double-spaced, and the handwriting was huge. — Linwood Barclay

It had become a chimney poking from a vertical universe of bookshelves.
There was motion below her. There were people on the shelves.
They clung to the edges of the cases and moved across them in expert scuttles. They wore ropes and hooks and carried picks on which they sometimes hung. Dangling from straps they carried notebooks, pens, magnifying glasses, ink pads, and stamps.
The men and women took books from the shelves as they went, checked their details, leaning against their ropes, replaced them, pulled out little pads and made notes, sometimes carried the books with them to another place and reshelved it there.
...
I'm Margarita Staples. She bowed in her harness. 'Extreme librarian. Bookaneer. — China Mieville

As for not getting things right: I constantly rerun social situations/conversations I experience/have throughout my head, and I'm always writing them down in notebooks or in word documents/the Internet. I feel like these habits and a generally good memory of people/the interactions I have with them (due to studying people having always been my main interest in life) have lead me to being very accurate in things I write in stories/essays. — Marie Calloway

You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine. — Wallace Stegner

Are you one of those people? One of the people with too many good ideas? The folks who have notebooks filled with notions, or daydreams filled with the future? You've certainly met these people. They're too busy taking notes to get anything done, too busy inventing to actually instigate. To stop this process, one needs to do only two things: Start. And then . . . Ship. Can't — Seth Godin

You probably even dream about me." His gaze lowered to my mouth. I felt my lips part. "I bet you even write my name in your notebooks, over and over again, with a little heart drawn around it. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

Creation is not a moment of inspiration but a lifetime of endurance. The drawers of the world are full of things begun. Unfinished sketches, pieces of invention, incomplete product ideas, notebooks with half-formulated hypotheses, abandoned patents, partial manuscripts. Creating is more monotony than adventure. It is early mornings and late nights: long hours doing work that will likely fail or be deleted or erased - a process without progress that must be repeated daily for years. Beginning is hard, but continuing is harder. Those who seek a glamorous life should not pursue art, science, innovation, invention, or anything else that needs new. Creation is a long journey where most turns are wrong and most ends are dead. The most important thing creators do is work. The most important thing they don't do is quit. The — Kevin Ashton

When you write non-fiction, you sit down at your desk with a pile of notebooks, newspaper clippings, and books and you research and put a book together the way you would a jigsaw puzzle. — Janine Di Giovanni

Tonight I write this journal entry on my laptop. Other nights I have handwritten entries in notebooks. Sometimes I jot down notes as I ride home in the cab or wait for an appointment. I want all of this
everything and everyone
to stay with me. — Paula Huntley

There is an aspect of my character that tends to latch on to one difficult but potentially solvable problem, rather than grapple with the vast and unsolvable problem that would be all I could see, if I were to look up, figuratively speaking, from my small blue notebooks. — Ben H. Winters

She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death. — Milan Kundera

The plastic-covered notebooks were candy-colored and palm-size, brimming with the characters and arcana of a prosperous and long-standing children's entertainment combine. The creation myth of the product line concerned the adventures of a clever, effeminate armadillo and his cohort of resourceful desert critters. — Colson Whitehead

People are curious. A few people are ... They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish. — Alice Munro

I work by hand, with a fountain pen, in bound notebooks I buy in India. — Damon Galgut

Near my desk, I keep a large plastic carton filled with fresh notebooks and stationery of various kinds, sizes, and qualities. — Michael Dirda

For years and years I carried these notebooks around with me - I had hundreds of pages of notes, these fragments that consisted of biographical anecdotes, diary passages, critical rants, agitations, scenes of my marriage. — Kate Zambreno

When my son David was a high school senior in 2003, his graduating class went on a camping trip in the desert. A creative writing educator visited the camp and led the group through an exercise designed to develop their sensitivity and imaginations. Each student was given a pen, a notebook, a candle, and matches. They were told to walk a short distance into the desert, sit down alone, and "discover themselves." The girls followed instructions. The boys, baffled by the assignment, gathered together, threw the notebooks into a pile, lit them with the matches, and made a little bonfire. — Christina Hoff Sommers

Scrolls, notebooks, tablet computers, daggers, and a large bowl filled with jelly beans, — Rick Riordan

Usually, I have a lot of acquaintance with the story before I start writing it. When I didn't have regular time to give to writing, stories would just be working in my head for so long that when I started to write I was deep into them. Now, I do that work by filling notebooks. — Alice Munro

I've been slightly obsessed with paper and notebooks. Among my most precious possessions is a small light-blue, breviary-sized volume - four-and-a-half inches wide, seven inches tall - made by a company called Denbigh. — Michael Dirda

When I started working in fashion, I didn't have money to buy photographs, so I'd Xerox pictures from magazines and put them in notebooks. When I'd start a collection, I'd sit with my old notebooks and look through them for inspiration. — John Varvatos

Before that, before it was ever a hotel at all, five full centuries ago, it was the home of a wealthy privateer who gave up raiding ships to study bees in the pastures outside Saint-Malo, scribbling in notebooks and eating honey straight from combs. The crests above the door lintels still have bumblebees carved into the oak; the ivy-covered fountain in the courtyard is shaped like a hive. Werner's favorites are five faded frescoes on the ceilings of the grandest upper rooms, where bees as big as children float against blue backdrops, big lazy drones and workers with diaphanous wings - where, above a hexagonal bathtub, a single nine-foot-long queen, with multiple eyes and a golden-furred abdomen, curls across the ceiling. — Anthony Doerr

If the subject of Lon's cock had been a high school subject, then he'd have been a star pupil. His notebooks would've been filled with writing, and his homework completed every single night. — Renae Kaye

Like so many aspiring writers who still have boxes of things they've written in their parents' houses, I filled notebooks with half-finished poems and stories and first paragraphs of novels that never got written. — Ally Carter

I've been poked fun of throughout my career by fellow actors for my notes that I take. I have spiral notebooks that I carry with me on every project I do, and I take notes just so that if I have to relive a scene, if I have to go back, I know what I did. — Anna Chlumsky

Poe's drunkenness was a mnemonic device, a deliberate method of work, drastic and fatal, no doubt, but suited to his passionate nature. Poe taught himself to drink, just as a careful man of letters makes a deliberate practice of filling his notebooks with notes. — Charles Baudelaire

When Leonardo da Vinci wanted to create a whole new style of painting, one that was more lifelike and emotional, he engaged in an obsessive study of details. He spent endless hours experimenting with forms of light hitting various geometrical solids, to test how light could alter the appearance of objects. He devoted hundreds of pages in his notebooks to exploring the various gradations of shadows in every possible combination. He gave this same attention to the folds of a gown, the patterns in hair, the various minute changes in the expression of a human face. When we look at his work we are not consciously aware of these efforts on his part, but we feel how much more alive and realistic his paintings are, as if he had captured reality. — Robert Greene

I work fitfully, in hope rather than in expectation, invent methods which last a week, and fill notebooks with tiny, illegible writing which often defies my own attempts to decipher it. — Anthony Minghella

I write with a Uni-Ball Onyx Micropoint on nine-by-seven bound notebooks made by a Canadian company called Blueline. After I do a few drafts, I type up the poem on a Macintosh G3 and then send it out the door. — Billy Collins

When I knew what I had to do / I took all my notebooks, all my manuscripts / and ate them page by page / so I could take my words with me — Nicole Blackman

Notebooks. There are dozens of notebooks. I always carry notebooks with me. I scribble in them in a barely readable scrawl. I do not write jokes. I write moments. Thoughts. Fragments that I have to sweat over as if they're cryptic texts in a lost language when I try to interpret them. That shouldn't be part of my process - decoding my own writing - but it has been for my entire life. What does that say about me? Why can't I make it easy? I need to complicate everything to protect myself from success and to remain complicated and overwhelmed. — Marc Maron

There's this poem," Cassidy finally said, "by Mary Oliver. And I used to write a line from it in all of my school notebooks to remind myself that I didn't have to be embarrassed of the past and afraid of the future. And it helped. So I'm giving it to you. The line is, 'Tell me, what is it you plan to do/With your one wild and precious life?'" We — Robyn Schneider

When I was able to get home it first hit me that you had left and I couldn't do anything about it. Every day before that an evening with you was waiting for me after school, now no more, strange feeling. I had grown too accustomed to your warmth. That is also a danger. At home I looked at the notebooks that you had bought and I got the stupidest surge of hope that I'd find something of you, something especially for meant for me. I would so much like to have something of you that I could always keep by me, that nobody else would notice. — Sophie Scholl

I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories? — Virginia Woolf

To the average eye, my bedroom was a complete disaster. The floor was hardly visible with all of the empty soda bottles, chip bags, and piles of clothes covering it. The rustic nightstand by my bed was so cluttered with papers, more soda bottles, notebooks, and hoodies that it looked like a pile of contemporary art. And my bed? It was just a pile of dark blue blankets and pillows scattered on an old mattress. What's the point in making your bed, anyway? You're just gonna mess it up and unmake it at the end of the day. Why even bother? My bedroom might look like a mess to anyone else, but to me, it was my own personal oasis. I liked it just the way it was. I never bought the whole saying, "A cluttered room is a cluttered mind." Me? Cluttered? Nah. More like creative. The more cluttered your room is, the more creative you are. And judging by my room, I must be pretty creative. I — Savannah Ostler

Poppy used to share the room with her older sister, and piles of he sister's outgrown clothes still remained spread out in drifts, along with a collection of used makeup and notebooks covered in stickers and scrawled with lyrics. A jumbled of her sister's old Barbies were on top of a bookshelf, waiting for Poppy to try and fix their melted arms and chopped hair. The bookshelves were overflowing with fantasy paperbacks and overdue library books, some of them on Greek myths, some on mermaids, and a few on local hauntings. The walls were covered in posters-Doctor Who, a cat in a bowler hat, and a giant map of Narnia. — Holly Black

I keep threatening to keep a formal journal, but whenever I start one it instantly becomes an exercise in self-consciousness. Instead of a journal I manage to have dozens of notebooks with bits and pieces of stories, poems, and notes. Almost every thing I do has its beginning in a notebook of some sort, usually written on a bus or train. — Walter Dean Myers

She had taken a degree in Domestic Science in a college in northern England, and used notebooks from her class to order the household's meals. Sunday: roast beef. Monday: collops with sippets of toast (mince). Tuesday: beef stew. Wednesday: brawn. Thursday: steak and kidney pie. Friday: stewed oxheart. Saturday: tripe and onions. To be a white housewife was hardly arduous. — Doris Lessing

At any rate, nothing was more characteristic of him [Walter Benjamin] in the thirties than the little notebooks with black covers which he always carried with him and in which he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in the way of "pearls" and "coral." On occasion he read from them aloud, showed them around like items from a choice and precious collection. — Hannah Arendt

I write on a computer, but I've run the complete gambit. When I was very young, I wrote with a ballpoint pen in school notebooks. Then I got pretentious and started writing with a dip pen on parchment (I wrote at least a novel-length poem that way). Moved on to a fountain pen. Then a typewriter, then an electric self-correct. Then someone gave me a word processor and I was amazed at being able to fit ten pages on one of those floppy discs. — Charles De Lint

I want you to start a brand-new section in your notebooks and call it Mr. Browne's Precepts." He kept talking as we did what he was telling us to do. "Put today's date at the top of the first page. And from now on, at the beginning of every month, I'm going to write a new Mr. Browne precept on the chalkboard and you're going to write it down in your notebook. Then we're going to discuss that precept and what it means. And at the end of the month, you're going to write an essay about it, about what it means to you. So by the end of the year, you'll all have your own list of precepts to take away with you. — R.J. Palacio

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

When you're born in this world you're given a ticket to the Freak Show. And when you're born in America, you're given a front row seat. And some of us get to sit there with notebooks. — George Carlin

Because I am an officer and a gentleman they have given me my notebooks, pen, ink and paper. So I write and wait. I am committed to no cause, I love no living person. The fact that I have no future except what you can count in hours doesn't seem to disturb me unduly. After all, the future whether here or there is equally unknown. So for the waiting days I have only the past to play about with. I can juggle with a series of possibly inaccurate memories, my own interpretation, for what is worth, of events. There is no place for speculation or hope, or even dreams. Strangely enough I think I like it like that. — Jennifer Johnston

His son Peter Bucky happily spent time driving Einstein around, and he later wrote down some of his recollections in extensive notebooks. They provide a delightful picture of the mildly eccentric but deeply un-affected Einstein in his later years. Peter tells, for example, of driving in his convertible with Einstein when it suddenly started to rain. Einstein pulled off his hat and put it under his coat. When Peter looked quizzical, Einstein explained: "You see, my hair has withstood water many times before, but I don't know how many times my hat can. — Walter Isaacson

If writing is the ultimate act of self-pleasure, then mine certainly qualifies as masturbatory.
Still, if you gave me a box of pens and a box of tissues, and then locked me in a room with nothing else but skin mags and blank notebooks, I'd be lying if I told you I'd run out of pens before tissues.
The nice thing about writing is that you actually get to share it with other people when you're done, which usually doesn't go over so well with spent bodily fluids, but ideally you don't want readers walking away from your book with the sneaking suspicion that they've just spent hours of their precious lives watching you masturbate.
Unless of course it's that type of publication. — Arthur Graham

I carry a small spiral notebook with me at all times and have been doing this for many years. There's a shoe box in my closet filled with these notebooks, each riddled with notes and impressions, ideas, schemes, and soup recipes. — Patrick DeWitt

Good Health At the busstop a swarm of youngsters crowded on board. Loaded down with books and notebooks and other stuff, they filled the bus with nonstop chatter and laughter. Talking all at once, shouting, pushing, showing off, they laughed at anything and everything. — Eduardo Galeano

How do I like to write? withe a soft pencil and a hard dick, not the other way round.
I like the paper of all kinds : creamy, white, yellow, thick, thin, lined, plain. In my cupboard I have at least fifty notebooks, each of which, at the time of purchase, filled me with excitement of what might be said of new thoughts discovered ... and then-nothing. — Hanif Kureishi

I had already done a lot of research for Rough Riders, keeping notebooks and old photographs. Some of the books were antiques for that time period, with the covers falling off. — Tom Berenger

But this brings me back to my nagging question. I had notebooks filled with potential missions, yet I had resisted devoting myself to any one in particular. And I'm not alone in this reluctance to act. Many people have lots of career capital, and can therefore identify a variety of different potential missions for their work, but few actually build their career around such missions. It seems, therefore, that there's more to this career tactic than simply getting to the cutting edge. Once you have the capital required to identify a mission, you must still figure out how to put the mission into practice. If you don't have a trusted strategy for making this leap from idea to execution, then like me and so many others, you'll probably avoid the leap altogether. This — Cal Newport

P R E S I D E N T Y O S H I D A'S T E N S P A R T A N R UlE S Hideo Yoshida's quest for management excellence was no doubt driven by his visions for Japanese marketing and media, but also by an overall worry about Japan's economic prospects after World War II. As a result, he developed a set of business and work principles, or rules, which he called the "Ten Spartan Rules": difficult work.5. Once you begin a task, complete it. Never give up.6. Lead and set an example for your fellow workers.7. Set goals for yourself to ensure a constant sense of purpose.8. Move with confidence. It gives your work force and substance.9. At all times, challenge yourself to think creatively and find new solutions.10. When confrontation is necessary, don't shy away from it. Confrontation is often necessary to achieve progress. These traditional work rules still guide Dentsu's employees, and are carried around in their notebooks — Anonymous

My comedy notebooks are filled with random journal entries. It's all the same. I can look back on old joke notebooks, and know exactly what was going on in my life. — Sarah Silverman

There came this point where I sat down with all my notebooks and I had to start to write, when I thought: this whole notion of writing for the person who understands nothing, the average reader ... He has to die! I can't have him in my head. And so the person I started writing for was the homicide detective. — David Simon

Contrary to her sister-in-law Janie's claims, Celia hadn't been in love with Kyle Gilchrist since her childhood - she'd simply loved to annoy him ... Armed with childish logic, Celia made it her mission to get under Kyle's skin as often as possible.
She'd drawn hearts emblazoned with her name on every one of his school notebooks.
He'd retaliated by stringing up her My Little Pony collection from a tree.
She'd pushed him into the stock tank.
He'd held her down and tickled her until she peed her pants.
She'd put a snapping turtle in his gym bag.
He'd tied her to the tire swing and spun her until she puked.
All harmless pranks that demanded retaliation. — Lorelei James

Co-operating critics comb the studios like big-league scouts, prepared to spot the art of the future and to take lead in establishing reputations. Art historians stand by ready with cameras and notebooks to make sure every novel detail is safe for the record. The tradition of the new has reduced all other traditions to triviality ... — Harold Rosenberg

Within those confining walls, teachers - a bunch of men all armed with the same information - gave the same lectures every year from the same notebooks and every year at the same point in the textbooks made the same jokes. — Yukio Mishima

The notebooks of Paul Brunton represent the acme of wisdom on the nature of human spirituality. Every serious student of this subject will profit enormously by becoming acquainted with Brunton's seminal work. — Kenneth Ring

Actually, when I look at my old notebooks, I think I have been a bit self-indulgent and have given myself too much time to meander in my discursive thoughts. I could have cut through sooner. Yet it is good to know about our terrible selves, not laud or criticize them, just acknowledge them. Then, out of this knowledge, we are better equipped to make a choice for beauty, kind consideration and clear truth. We make this choice with our feet firmly on the ground. We are not running wildly after beauty with fear at our backs. — Natalie Goldberg

I was a serious poet for quite a while and had little notebooks filled with poetry. — Denis O'Hare

The music starts as being way separate from the lyrics, and I write - I have notebooks that I fill with drawings and just words, and stuff that I've written. — Zachary Cole Smith

She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. — David Nicholls

I want, I want, I want... At this point I'm just a mass of seething wants, but what I want I'm not really sure of. (Like going to the fridge, and opening it, letting all the cold air out...and not knowing what it is you want to eat. You stand with the door open hoping that something will you inspire you.) I'm standing with the door open at the fridge of life, and I want. — Joanne Horniman

So much of life is invisible, inscrutable: layers of thoughts, feelings, outward events entwined with secrecies, ambiguities, ambivalences, obscurities, darknesses strongly present even to the one who's lived it- maybe especially to the one who's lived it. I didn't seek to find her, wandered instead within and among her fragments of language-notebooks, drafts, journals, fictions, letters, essays, and found there whole worlds like spinning planets, lived in their cold light and burning light, wondering where I was, where they might take me. Curious, I heard a monster's voice and followed- — Laurie Sheck

When I'm in the field, when I'm working, I keep very careful notes. I wear big shirts with big breast pockets, and I carry in them two little spiral notebooks. — Peter Matthiessen

He pressed bravely ahead with his story, the outlines and preliminary versions of which by now filled two thick notebooks, reorganizing, redrafting, and obsessively re-polishing lines and paragraphs with a jeweler's precision.
But it was not good enough.
He wanted the pages to sing with ideas that had once seemed so important to him, all and everything he knew, and yet they did not, and no amount of diligence was able to bring them to life. The story came to be a burden and weighed more heavily in his hands each time he lifted it out of the drawer. After a few weeks he was reluctant to open the desk at all.
("Talking In The Dark") — Dennis Etchison