Top 100 Outline Quotes
#1. The first task is to get to know the players really well-watching them as individuals in training and in match play-to see what is good in their natural game. Then, and only then, can we begin to outline the general tactics.
Helenio Herrera
#2. But who, save the nerve-worn and sleepless, or thinkers standing with hands to the eyes on some crag above the multitude, see things thus in skeleton outline, bare of flesh?
Virginia Woolf
#3. The first sequel thing I wrote was this 'Forever Dawn' thing that will never get out, because it's horrid. But it's a really good outline for 'Breaking Dawn' - it's very similar. I knew what I was doing, which is good, because I think if I hadn't, there might have been a lot of pressure.
Stephenie Meyer
#4. Jessica, falling in love can't always be a happily ever after or a once in a lifetime kind of story. Those happen in books, in movies. This is life and it's real. Life has no script, no outline. We broke the rules of love long ago. All I know for sure is that with you, the rules will never apply.
Kathryn Perez
#5. Although there still lingered in his mind a faint and unperfect recollection of the events of the preceding night; just as the brain retains on waking in the morning the dim and misty outline of a dream.
Alexandre Dumas
#6. I cannot outline. I do not know what the next thing is going to happen in the book until it comes out of my fingers.
Patricia Reilly Giff
#7. Because from what I've seen of marriages and relationships, there aren't any rules. You deal with what comes, like anything else in life. There's no template. No freaking outline. And that's what makes relationships interesting, right? The element of surprise.
Kristin Walker
#8. The basic outline of the philosophy of the Buribunks: I think, therefore I am; I speak therefore I am; I write, therefore I am; I publish therefore I am.
Carl Schmitt
#9. Was Hale. He glanced toward Node 3, wondering if the cryptographer were watching. "Fuck it," he grumbled. Below his feet the outline of a recessed trapdoor
Dan Brown
#10. It is already a great thing if the main ideas and general outline of a work come without any racking of brains, as the result of that supernatural and inexplicable force we call inspiration.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
#11. The sound of a boot heel striking her hardwood floor. The darkness coalesced, gained an outline. A tall, broad-shouldered figure dressed in black stepped forward. A deep voice said, "I won't let you go to Worontzoff's house, Charity.
Lisa Marie Rice
#12. The issue is: how do you engage the audience? And one of the things I talk to our communicators about is: The outline is great; the stories are great. But how do you engage them? How do you make it feel like we are on a journey, not you are just up there giving me information.
Andy Stanley
#13. My Templeton is to Cooperstown as a shadow is to the tree that spawned it; an outline that takes texture from the ground it falls on.
Lauren Groff
#14. I think that by following the route that I have tried to outline, one gets into a much more interesting and productive series of questions than those that result from saying simply that Chinese don't like milk because they don't like milk.
Marvin Harris
#15. Look at the subject as if you have never seen it before. Examine it from every side. Draw its outline with your eyes or in the air with your hands, and saturate yourself with it.
John Baldessari
#16. For 'Boxers & Saints,' I started by reading a couple of articles on the Internet, then writing a really rough outline, then getting more hardcore into the research. I went to a university library once a week for a year, year and a half.
Gene Luen Yang
#17. The main concern of the study is with the outline of a theoretical system. Its minor variations from writer to writer are not a matter of concern to this analysis.
Talcott Parsons
#18. To all that he touched he gave a new meaning, a new color, a new outline, a new loveliness, and a new poignancy.
Frederick Delius
#19. She felt like a fictional character who'd escaped the book in which her creator had carefully and kindly trapped her, taken a pair of scissors to her outline and leaped, free ...
Kate Morton
#20. I'm a big fan of outlining. Here's the theory: If I outline, then I can see the mistakes I'm liable to make. They come out more clearly in the outline than they do in the pages.
Cynthia Voigt
#21. When I sat down and wrote the first paragraph, I was like, 'Oh, I can go with this.' I didn't do an outline. I didn't do anything. I just wrote sentence by sentence, not knowing where the story was going.
Colleen Hoover
#22. The girl traced the outline of her lover's shadow so she would always have a record of how he looked ...
Chuck Palahniuk
#23. I don't think I'm good in bed. My husband never said anything, but after we made love he'd take a piece of chalk and outline my body.
Joan Rivers
#24. If you take a few days to write an outline, you're just making up scenes that you think will work, that you think will be interesting. But as you write it, other ideas occur - better ideas that have to do with what you're writing.
Elmore Leonard
#25. Animals outline their territories with their excretions, humans outline their territories by ink excretions on paper.
Robert Anton Wilson
#26. Colouring does not depend on where the colours are put, but on where the lights and darks are put, and all depends on form and outline, on where that is put.
William Blake
#27. I'm a pantser. I try to plot. I always try to plot. I end up with a few paragraphs that basically outline the gist of the story.But I never get much beyond that. I get too impatient to write.
Pamela Clare
#28. The Christian faith is meant to be lived moment by moment. It isn't some broad, general outline
it's a long walk with a real Person. Details count: passing thoughts, small sacrifices, a few encouraging words, little acts of kindness, brief victories over nagging sins.
Joni Eareckson Tada
#29. The only way for us to make sense of life today is to appreciate where the future is going. Scripture outlines that future, not with detailed dates, but with a general outline of what is to come. That outline is designed not to have us prepare charts, but to prepare our hearts.
Darrell Bock
#30. Well, I outline fanatically. I am a long thinker and a slow writer, though I am trying to get faster.
William Landay
#31. Even someone you've inhabited rooms with, and seen naked everyday, seen sitting on the toilet through a half-opened door, can fade out after a while and become an outline.
Elizabeth Kostova
#32. And I think it was the outline of that church tower at Belaugh against the sky which gave me a passion for churches so that every church I've past since I've wanted to stop and look in.
John Betjeman
#33. She leans forward, revealing an ear: a freshly formed, soap-smooth, pretty ear, its delicate outline glistening with a tracery of fine hairs.
Haruki Murakami
#34. People ask me how to start writing. I tell them that 'Creating Creates Creativity'. Put your notes and outline aside. Start with one anecdote or conversation, and that will lead to another and another. It's the steps, the path, not the final destination that drives the process or writing.
Dick Sederquist
#35. I always have a basic plot outline, but I like to leave some things to be decided while I write.
J.K. Rowling
#36. Ingres was one of those artists to whom the outline was something sacred and magical, and the reason is that it was the means of reconciling the major conflict in his art, the conflict between abstraction and sensibility.
Kenneth Clark
#37. The truth is that you do forget people. When you conjure them up, long after they have gone, you can't recall the essence of them, just the outline.
Helen Humphreys
#38. Having done television for almost 20 years now, a pilot is kind of like a rough draft. It's like bringing people into your ultrasound and hooking up to the monitor and going, "Isn't my baby beautiful?" "Yeah. I can only see the outline of it, but it looks like it might be."
Matt Bomer
#39. I never outline. I don't work from an outline. I have no idea where the book is going. I mean, even two-thirds of the way through, I don't know how it's going to end.
Tom Robbins
#40. I don't write a play from beginning to end. I don't write an outline. I write scenes and moments as they occur to me. And I still write on a typewriter. It's not all in ether. It's on pages. I sequence them in a way that tends to make sense. Then I write what's missing, and that's my first draft.
Richard Greenberg
#41. Until then I had lived as I had painted and versified - that is, I never got far beyond priming canvas, beyond penning an outline, a first act, a first stanza. There are simply people who start all sorts of things and yet never finish any of them. And that was the kind of person I was.
Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch
#42. The more work you put in on your outline and getting the skeleton of your story right, the easier the process is later.
Drew Goddard
#43. I love the Web, but the basis of my work is going through the physical books. When you go to the library, you see other books around on the shelves that you never knew existed. You can flip through a book and see the whole outline of it.
Camille Paglia
#44. She didn't mean to be sexy that moment, but even a winter nightgown couldn't hide that lovely outline. When will I outgrow my simple-minded fascination with the form she had happened to choose for her body? Never, I thought
Richard Bach
#45. The sea, like a crinkled chart, spread to the horizon, and lapped the sharp outline of the coast, while the houses were white shells in a rounded grotto, pricked here and there by a great orange sun.
Daphne Du Maurier
#46. All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.
Tom Stoppard
#47. You ask me what I'm looking for, and I outline you.
you don't recognize the shape, offer other names.
you say my time will come, and I hope.
David Levithan
#49. I enjoy writing scripts. I can find out what happens. With an outline, I feel like I'm doing an architectural diagram of something.
Neil Gaiman
#50. We have two layers of presence: the universe of doing and the universe of being; the outline and the inside.
Pramod Bajpai
#51. We really had the whole piece laid out in like a Word file, just from beginning to end. It was kind of more like your creative-writing class in school. You know, you have the outline and then you just kind of plug the stuff in the little map you've made.
Crowder
#52. The position now taken by the Government is absolutely destructive of legitimate business, because they outline no rule of conduct for business of any magnitude.
Theodore Roosevelt
#53. His mother stood before him like a monument. He saw her great outline through the blur of his weakness and his passion. She made no movement at all.
Mervyn Peake
#54. I start with a beat sheet, which is more of an abbreviated outline. It hits all the major plot points. From there, I move to note cards. But the most important part of my process is my inspiration board.
Kami Garcia
#55. To Outline Natural Limitations Of The Universe Is To Engage Mathematical Laws
Sunday Adelaja
#56. Outlining is like putting on training wheels. It gives me the courage to write, but we always go off the outline.
Hallie Ephron
#57. The Bible has a human history as well as a divine inspiration. It is a history full of interest, and it is one which all those who value their Bible should know, at least in outline, if only that they may be able to meet the criticisms of sceptics and the ignorant.
Frederic G. Kenyon
#58. Never in my life had I felt as exposed as I did right then. Her fingertips softened as they traced along the outline of my sins, as she caressed the markings of every mistake I'd ever made as if this girl somehow found some kind of beauty in them.
A.L. Jackson
#60. Newton's time it was possible for an educated person to have a grasp of the whole of human knowledge, at least in outline. But since then, the pace of the development of science has made this impossible.
Stephen Hawking
#61. Without need for excuse or elaborate theodicies, malevolence explains the world that is, and by the strength and rigidity of this explanation an imprint - an outline - of the Creator who cherishes His anonymity is revealed.
John Zande
#62. When writing, I uncage KAT: Keep Adding Tension. Even if I don't know where the story's going, petting the KAT keeps it purring.
Don Roff
#63. As we open up our church meetings to God's power, they will not always follow a predetermined schedule or order. Who can outline what God might have in mind?
Jim Cymbala
#64. This is kind of hard to articulate, but in broad outline, the United States is going to do what the United States has to do.
Wesley Clark
#65. What is a shadow? It is the self without a face or a name, all outline and no feature, the self on the verge of being erased. It is the incidental child of matter and light. Look how it spreads itself on the ground, weary but weightless, unable to leave a trace.
Conchitina Cruz
#66. In the world of your story, your outline is like the Ten Commandments. Unfortunately, your characters are all Atheists.
Jefferson Smith
#67. When I try to outline the history of ethical life, it's sometimes possible to find evidence for a hypothesis about how important transitions actually went. Often, however, that isn't so. There are many facts about human life in the Paleolithic we're never likely to know.
Philip Kitcher
#68. Only a handful of minutes ago, I'd seen the outline of her pass in front of the windows. Sadly, she was completely clothed.
Jennifer L. Armentrout
#69. My hope that the Church will emerge as a strong leader in society is just that a hope. What I described in The Catholic Moment is not a prophecy but the outline of a possibility. There are no guarantees that my hopes expressed in The Catholic Moment will ever be realised.
Richard John Neuhaus
#70. The true purpose of prayer is to get into God's presence so He can outline His agenda for us.
Mark Batterson
#71. I try to be self-analytical, both to outline the mistakes I made in my life and try to explain why I did, and the things that on balance I did pretty well on.
William J. Clinton
#72. All those years I'd kept an outline of my father in my head, like a chalk line enclosing a father-shaped space. When I was little, I'd coloured it in often enough. But those colours had been too bright and the outline had been too large ...
Margaret Atwood
#73. The car, by bisecting the human outline, diminishes it, producing a race of half-people in a motion not of their own making
Marya Mannes
#74. I am a big outliner. For my adult book, 'The Visibles,' I did not outline, and it took me two years to write because I just didn't outline, and I had no path.
Sara Shepard
#75. I don't plot the books out ahead of time, I don't plan them. I don't begin at the beginning and end at the end. I don't work with an outline and I don't work in a straight line.
Diana Gabaldon
#76. No matter how much I admire our schools, I know that no university exists that can provide an education; what a university can provide is an outline, to give the learner a direction and guidance. The rest one has to do for oneself.
Louis L'Amour
#77. A mother's example sketches the outline of her child's character.
Tim Howard
#78. I read round the subject, I make a skeleton outline, and then I start work in the relevant archives. During the marshaling of the material, I copy the material from each archive file across to the relevant chapter in the skeleton outline.
Antony Beevor
#79. When you get ready to write your novel, outline it first. There's nothing worse than getting halfway through and realizing you've painted yourself in a plot corner.
Janet Evanovich
#80. I finally get to the place where the book has matured in my mind and I can hardly wait to start writing it. Then I just sit down and I start. I hit the go button. I have an outline, which is 70 pages, but I don't look at it. I never have to look at it.
Stephen J. Cannell
#81. I've been told that people in the army do more by 7:00 am than I do in an entire day But if I wake at 6:59 am and turn to you to trace the outline of your lips with mine I will have done enough and killed no one in the process.
Shane Koyczan
#82. I envy those writers who outline their novels, who know where they're going. But I find writing is a process of discovery.
Jay McInerney
#83. I don't start a novel until I have lived with the story for awhile to the point of actually writing an outline and after a number of books I've learned that the more time I spend on the outline the easier the book is to write. And if I cheat on the outline I get in trouble with the book.
John Grisham
#84. You have to take the basics of feminism and the kind of outline of it and do what you do with it. You have to make things work for your own life.
Sandra Bernhard
#85. What matters is to live in the present, live now, for every moment is now. It is your thoughts and acts of the moment that create your future. The outline of your future path already exists, for you created its pattern by your past.
Sai Baba
#86. She was a beautiful woman." Gavner sighed, tracing the outline of one of the elephants. "She just had very bad taste in underwear ... "
"And in boyfriends," I added impishly.
Mr. Crepsley burst into laughter at that
Darren Shan
#88. My general writing preface is to write an outline and then ignore about half of it, both on a micro level with the individual book, and on a macro level with the series as a whole, and that's pretty much what's happened.
Daniel Handler
#89. I write stuff down. I have a chalkboard in the kitchen where I will scrawl stuff down if I have a faint outline of an idea. And I'll go into my office or whatever. But that goes from format to format.
John Darnielle
#90. I do not outline. There are writers I know and count as my friends who certainly do it the other way, but for me, part of the adventure is not knowing how it's going to turn out.
Joyce Maynard
#91. I tend to edit some as I go - partly because one of the reasons I don't outline much is that I don't know what the next scene will be until I've actually written the previous scene.
Ann Leckie
#92. Structure doesn't make a story formulaic. The writer does.
Peter Arpesella
#93. I went to this tattoo parlor in the East Village and I got an outline of a violin on my lower back. They call them tramp stamps now.
Katherine Moennig
#94. I'm not somebody who comes in with a whole outline, and says, "Here's the movie we're going to make." That's not what a documentary is for me. I think a documentary is about capturing events as they unfold in real time.
Morgan Spurlock
#95. I don't have very complete scripts for my films. I have a general outline and a character in my mind, and I make no notes until I find the character who's in my mind in reality.
Abbas Kiarostami
#96. Normally, I spend a week on the outline and take two weeks to write the book.
R.L. Stine
#97. The way I outline has changed quite a bit from when I first started writing.
George Stephen
#98. In 'The Purity Myth,' I not only discuss what the purity myth is and reveal its consequences for women, but also outline a new way for us to think about young women as moral actors, one that doesn't include their bodies.
Jessica Valenti
#99. You cannot be doomed, after all, as long as you can still see the faint outline of hope on the opposite shore.
Jodi Picoult
#100. When you love a man, he becomes more than a body. His physical limbs expand, and his outline recedes, vanishes. He is rich and sweet and right. He is part of the world, the atmosphere, the blue sky and the blue water
Gwendolyn Brooks
