Writing Lists Quotes & Sayings

I talk to myself on paper about my characters - sometimes writing in first person ... I keep lists of unanswered questions that I can always turn to in order to get myself going. — Phyllis A. Whitney

I lean back in my chair and turn on my computer. I have to admit that writing the list did help. Another point for Dad, king of the lists. Bert asks if — Alice J. Wisler

[D]espite her alternative leanings, it turned out Crystal was not particularly psyco-babbly or airy-fairy or tree-huggy, as one might have expected.
In fact, the first thing she did was write a list. She said writing lists helped calm her down when she was stressed about anything because it put problems in order. You can look at a list of things and see how you can tackle each one separately without feeling sick about it, she said. Whereas if they all just stayed jumbled in your mind in one great bit sticky ball you never got to consider them individually.
She actually spoke a lot of sense for someone with toe rings and a Chinese tattoo. — Sarah-Kate Lynch

Happiness is only found within...No one can make you happy but yourself! If you are unhappy with who you are...What does that say about you? — April Clark

He that writes may be considered as a kind of general challenger, whom every one has a right to attack; since he quits the common rank of life, steps forward beyond the lists, and offers his merit to the public judgement. To commence author is to claim praise, and no man can justly aspire to honour, but at the hazard of disgrace. — Samuel Johnson

Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound & query signifying nothing — William Shakespeare

problems, your challenges, your obstacles, your goals, and your ideas in writing. Make small lists such as a: To-do list. Everything you need to do, big and small. To-call list. Everyone you need to call, major and minor. To-get over list. Baggage in your life, empty and full. To-resolve list. Things that need decision or resolution. To-pay list. All matters of money you think about, paid and unpaid. — Jeffrey Gitomer

God created us to be channels of blessing, but our ability to receive the resources with which He wants us to bless others, depends on our being able to give then away - freely, faithfully, generously. — Jack W. Hayford

Write a list of ways that you have benefited from being married to your spouse. Then write a list of your spouse's positive patterns and qualities. Keep adding to the lists and reread them frequently. — Zelig Pliskin

Writing, I am convinced, is the least appreciated of all the creative arts. Only a miniscule portion of the population engages in sculpting or painting or composing but everyone writes - whether it be letters, invitations, shopping lists...It is not far-fetched, therefore, for anyone with a smattering of self-esteem to believe that if he or she had the time, and the desire, an acceptable book or article could be produced. — Og Mandino

Many Christians assume that we can just experience God in a personal relationship apart from doctrine, but that's impossible. You cannot experience God without knowing who he is, what he has done, and who you are in relation to him. Even our most basic Christian experiences and commitments are theological. "I just love Jesus," some say. But who is Jesus? And why do you love him? — Michael S. Horton

Those who submit to the Lord with simple heart will run the good race. If they keep their minds on a leash, they will not draw the wickedness of the demons onto themselves. — John Climacus

I started hitting best-seller lists as soon as I stopped using outlines. With Strangers, I started with nothing more than a couple of characters I thought I'd like and with a premise. Nearly every new writer I know uses detailed outlines, and so did I for a long time. But when I stopped relying on them, my work became less stiff, more organic, less predictable. BUT, nearly every beginning writer I've known and some excellent veterans as well, such as Jeffery Deaver, create chapter-by-chapter outlines of considerable length before starting to write the novel. The point of this tip is simply that if you feel constrained by an outline, it isn't the only way to work. — Dean Koontz

And wow! Hey! What's this thing coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding word like ... ow ... ound ... round ... ground! That's it! That's a good name - ground! I wonder if it will be friends with me? — Douglas Adams

I never wanted to leave the Smashing Pumpkins. That was never the plan. — Billy Corgan

If something was worth writing down, it was worth writing down in full. And she had a horror of lists
grocery lists, Christmas card lists, and most grisly of all, to-do lists. Lists, like appointment books, were nails driven into the future. She knew this was an odd objection to be raised by a person whose daily life was utterly predictable, who never threw caution, or anything else, to the winds, who never packed light, because she never packed at all. Still, the future was a sleeping monster, not to be poked. — Jincy Willett

First, I'd become an avid reader of blogs, especially music blogs, and they seemed to be where the critical-thinking action was at, to have the kind of energy that I associate with rock writing of the 1970s or Internet e-mail discussion lists a decade ago. — Carl Wilson

I'm sorry," Billy says, "but I felt it was too organized. I like ellipses and teeny jottings and spontaneous poems and particularly all those devices like long lists of melancholy things. — Edmund White

Make lists. Write down the things that give you power. Write down the things that take your power away also. Make lists of people close to you. Are you associations raising you to a higher level of attention? — Frederick Lenz

If the chaos is overwhelming, I start making lists. To write it down puts it in perspective. — Renee Lawless

A poetic list is a talent in itself. You can write a list of things, and it can be boring. — Pattiann Rogers

Everyone seems possessed with the desire of writing articles upon me and sends me long lists of all I am to say. — Kate Greenaway

When I'm supposed to be writing I clean my apartment, take my clothes to the laundry, get organized, make lists, do the dishes. I would never do a dish unless I had to write. — Fran Lebowitz

Your hair is an act of God. — Sarah Kane

All our time spent making lists would be better spent painting, or writing, Or singing, or learning to speak stories. Sometimes I feel as though the Church has a kind of pity for Scripture, Always having to come behind it and explain everything, put everything into actionable steps, acronyms and hidden secrets, as though the original writers, and for that matter the Holy Spirit Who worked in the lives of the original writers, were a bunch of you literate hillbillies. I think the methodology God used to explain His Truth is quite superior. My life is a story, more than a list. I don't feel that a list could ever explain the complexity of all this beauty. — Donald Miller

As you begin to feel this enormous shift of consciousness, called multisensory perception, emerging in your awareness, you begin to reorient yourself. It's a reorientation that occurs toward yourself as more than a mind and a body; it's a reorientation that occurs toward others; toward your life as meaningful, rather than predetermined. It's a reorientation that occurs toward the universe as alive, wise and compassionate, instead of inert (which means dead) and random. — Gary Zukav

People often ask me what advice I have for writers, and I reply that the most important responsibility I believe a writer has is to his or her personal truth. Don't be misled by the best seller lists. Just do what feels true to you. Speak your heart, however strange or revelatory it is. Don't be ashamed of how your imagination works. What a reader wants to discover in a book is what you hold uniquely in your head.I think making stories which touch people deeply is always hard. I've been writing plays and books for 20 years and I still go to my desk every morning with a mixture of excitement and dread. — Clive Barker

Lists help us manage the chaos of our lives - to impose order, if only for a moment. Writing a list clears the mind. ... Once everything is written down, it's easier to see which tasks are important and in what order to tackle them. Tasks that seem overwhelming look easier when reduced to mere lines on paper. — Sasha Cagen

But perhaps people who liked to write aways made lists! Just for the fun of it. — Maud Hart Lovelace

Reading has always been the largest and most irreplaceable pleasure for Vincent; reading about other people's successes and failures, joys and sufferings seemed to bury his own failures. — Irving Stone

The keeping of lists was for November an exercise kin to repeating of a rosary. She considered it neither obsessive nor compulsive, but a ritual, an essential ordering of the world into tall, thin jars containing perfect nouns. Enough nouns connected one to the other create a verb, and verbs had created everything, had skittered across the face of the void like pebbles across a frozen pond. She had not created a verb herself, but the cherry-wood cabinet in the hall contained book after book, jar after jar, vessel upon vessel, all brown as branches, and she had faith. — Catherynne M Valente

Smiley TV preachers might tell you that following Jesus is about being good so that God will bless you with cash and prizes, but really it's much more gruesome and meaningful. It's about spiritual physics. Something has to die for something new to live. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

The art of reading, as of learning, is this: ... to retain the essential, to forget the nonessential. — Adolf Hitler

I have no sympathy whatever with writing lists of the One Hundred Best Books, or the Five-Foot Library. It is all right for a man to amuse himself by composing a list of a hundred very good books; and if he is to go off for a year or so where he cannot get many books, it is an excellent thing to choose a five-foot library of particular books which in that particular year and on that particular trip he would like to read. But there is no such thing as a hundred books that are best for all men, or for the majority of men, or for one man at all times; and there is no such thing as a five-foot library which will satisfy the needs of even one particular man on different occasions extending over a number of years. — Theodore Roosevelt

Protectionism does not produce wealth, and free trade and economic openness are ultimately in everyone's interest — Thomas Piketty

He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurer's booth at a fair, and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only once; and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive, their effect is gone. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Writing a patch is the easiest part of open source. The truly hard stuff is all of the rest: bug trackers, mailing lists, documentation, and other management tasks. — Anonymous

I've been a list maker for years, even before I was a musician. I was always writing things down and kept long lists of things that would make good album titles and things like that. I'm constantly thinking in terms of songwriting. — Buzz Osborne

Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books. — Stephen King

fact, all the other war news was almost disregarded and the population had no way of getting any other news reports, since radios were unavailable. My Russian boss, for whom I prepared all the lists and bread ration cards, was a blond, slim Northerner from Leningrad. When sober, he was distant and quite proper; but when he was drunk, one had a hard time fighting him off. He was very demanding and we were forever writing. In the entire section there was not a single typewriter. Everything was written longhand. The bookkeepers were using the abacus, the only available calculator. — Pearl Fichman

The word "snobbery" came into use for the first time in England during 1820s. It was said to have derived from the habit of many Oxford and Cambridge colleges of writing sine nobilitate (without nobility) , or "s.nob", next to the names of the ordinary students on examinations lists in order to distinguish them from their aristocratic peers. In the word's earliest days, a snob was taken to mean someone without high status, but it quickly assumed its modern and almost diametrically opposed meaning: someone offended by a lack of high status in others, a person who believes in a flawless equations between social rank and human worth — Alain De Botton

In short, to enter the lists of literature is wilfully to expose yourself to the arrows of neglect, ridicule, envy, and disappointment. Whether you write well or ill, be assured that you will not escape from blame ... — Matthew Gregory Lewis