Quotes About Writing Down Ideas

#1. I never go online on my iPhone. Sometimes I'm tempted but I remind myself and the kids - it's a tool. Use it as a tool. You're not the tool. My iPhone, 85% of the time I'm writing down ideas.

Matthew McConaughey

#2. Hands down, the hardest part for me is coming up with an idea. I spend about 14 months writing a book, and that's a lot of hours spent thinking about a single project. I simply have to love the idea. I'll go through dozens of workable ideas until I find the one that lights my fire.

Kristin Hannah

#3. My writing process often begins with a question. I write down ideas and let them stew for about a year. Then, when I sit down to write, I make a list of characters and try to see how they fit.

Cynthia Voigt

#4. Students think they must write down the idea immediately, but I tell them if it's a good idea it'll be in your head in five minutes' time.

Judith Weir

#5. I've now learned how to do it, I can write anywhere. I'm the type of person that will get a random idea and then I'll have to write it down and then continue on it. It can be anywhere. It doesn't have to be a set place.

Alessia Cara

#6. Lord Bacon said, "Writing makes an exact man." He spoke the truth. Writing produces exactitude by forcing you to set down ideas in logical relation to one another. Writing crystallizes your thoughts and makes your ideas specific.

John Haggai

#7. Sometimes I dream that I'm working; that's awful. When you awaken after a big, surprising dream, you feel it's very interesting. When you sit and write it down, you realize it's a very poor script. But I may find ideas while dozing.

Michel Ocelot

#8. My favourite part of writing a book is thinking up the ideas, and that can start a long time before I actually sit down at my desk.

Anthony Horowitz

#9. I have withdrawn not only from men, but from affairs, especially my own affairs; I am working for later generations, writing down some ideas that may be of assistance to them.

Seneca The Younger

#10. Asked if he knew how important Stardust would be, Mitchell Parish said he did have a gut feeling that this was a momentous one. But had no idea it would become a standard. You don't sit down and write a standard, he explained. A standard evolves.

Paul Zollo

#11. As far as my creative urge is concerned, I do sit down and write my own music ... I'll tell you a writer who I think is a genius: Ray Stevens. He comes up with some of the most fantastic novelty ideas. Dolly Parton also writes well. I like a lot of songs, a lot of writers.

Boudleaux Bryant

#12. I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.

Jonathan Coe

#13. Well, as anyone who actually writes knows, if you sit down and are prepared, then the ideas come. There's a lot of different ways people explain that, but, you know, I find that if I sit down and I prepare myself, generally things get done.

Nick Cave

#14. I have a very long pre-writing process where I'm jotting down ideas in a notebook and ripping out relevant newspaper articles - a long fact-finding mission.

Megan McCafferty

#15. Keep things informal. Talking is the natural way to do business. Writing is great for keeping records and putting down details, but talk generates ideas. Great things come from out luncheon meetings which consist of a sandwich, a cup of soup, and a good idea or two. No martinis.

T. Boone Pickens

#16. I'm always writing ideas down and then I stick em in my pocket and put em in that folder so I don't lose them. Like, somebody might say something, and I'll go, oh that's a good line, and that goes in the folder, too. It's kind of an ongoing process for me.

Lucinda Williams

#17. I've always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.

Bill Gates

#18. Writing a manual forces you to place your thoughts and ideas down on paper.

Tara VanDerveer

#19. If a person has never given writing a try, they assume that a brilliant idea is hard to come by. But really, even if it takes some digging, ideas are out there. Just open your eyes and look at the world. Writing the ideas down, it turns out, is the real trick.

Ann Patchett

#20. Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.

Edward Abbey

#21. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.

Walter Benjamin

#22. Be a collector of good ideas. Keep a journal. If you hear a good idea, capture it, write it down. Don't trust your memory.

Jim Rohn

#23. Since I was a kid, I could make up stories, I could make up funny jokes and I could always do it. When I'm walking down the street or having dinner, ideas will hit me, and I write them down on matchbooks or napkins and throw them in the draw.

Woody Allen

#24. It's not an idea until you write it down.

Ivan Sutherland

#25. Composing is a slowed-down improvisation; often one cannot write fast enough to keep up with the stream of ideas.

Arnold Schoenberg

#26. Putting down on paper what you have to say is an important part of writing, but the words and ideas have to be shaped and cleaned, cleaned as severely as a dog cleans a bone, cleaned until there's not a shred of anything superfluous.

Maya Angelou

#27. I am a person of high energy. That, and I sit down and I write when I get an idea - I put other things aside.

John Darnielle

#28. To sit down at a computer every day and write a script is commendable. I don't have the patience for it, but I have some fantastic ideas.

Shiloh Fernandez

#29. I didn't have an agent. I would just write down that I was with my brother's agency, and then the agency would get calls and say that they had no idea who I was.

Blake Lively

#30. I want to advise this people, if the Lord ever does give you an inspiration, for heaven's sake write it down and remember it.

J. Golden Kimball

#31. Sometimes I start with lyrics - rarely - but sometimes I might have an idea for some lyrics that I wanna say. I write them down and figure out how to use that in a melody to write a song.

Leon Bridges

#32. I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth.

Kurt Vonnegut

#33. Ideas are the most fragile things in the world, and if you do not write them down, they will be lost forever.

Phil Cooke

#34. I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them.

J.K. Rowling

#35. Coming up with ideas is the easiest thing on earth. Putting them down is the hardest.

Rod Serling

#36. I personally feel the need to experience life and new music and ideas before I can sit down and start writing music again.

DJ Shadow

#37. Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself
it is the occurring which is difficult.

Stephen Leacock

#38. I don't come up with ideas, they come to me. I write them down and try to convey what's wrong with me to the audience as best I can.

Iliza Shlesinger

#39. One of the things everybody seems to want to ask writers is, "Where do you get your ideas?" When people ask me this, my usual response is, "Ideas are the easy part. The hard part is writing them down.

Patricia C. Wrede

#40. I got an idea: people like news why don't we write the news down on a piece of paper, and we'll gas them up and drive them to everyone's house. I mean, if you were going to say that now, it doesn't sound like a great idea, because there are other ways you can distribute the news.

Biz Stone

#41. In the shower, with the hot water coming down, you've left the real world behind, and very frequently things open up for you. It's the change of venue, the unblocking the attempt to force the ideas that's crippling you when you're trying to write.

Woody Allen

#42. I'm usually a panster and throw ideas down on computer the second they hit my brain. I even had to get off the treadmill to write down my ideas. It's a great place to 'zone out' and think about my plots and characters.

Franny Armstrong

#43. I didn't even write the lyrics down. I got in the booth, I put down a little guitar riff and the idea I had was it was going to be really simple, I just want it to be all about the lyrics and I just literally sang the lyrics.

Benji Madden

#44. I write in the mornings, in the bright daylight. But I get most of my good ideas after the sun has gone down and the dark is on the land.

Stephen King

#45. To develop the creative attitude, analyze and focus on the wanted SOLUTION; seek out and fill your mind with the FACTS; write down ideas, both sensible and seemingly wild; let the facts and ideas simmer in your mind; evaluate, recheck, settle on the creative ideas.

Bruce Lee

#46. I don't really like to just sit down at a computer and write because that tends to be a little forced. Sometimes the funniest ideas just happen in the moment, when you're talking to people, or you notice something.

Tom Green

#47. It is not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them.

Isabel Colegate

#48. The florid style is the reverse of the familiar. The last is employed as an unvarnished medium to convey ideas; the first is resorted to as a spangled veil to conceal the want of them. When there is nothing to be set down but words, it costs little to have them fine.

William Hazlitt

#49. I never used to write down all the ideas that occur to me while writing. I believed if I forgot them they were not important, and the ones that really mattered were those I remembered. Now I write them all down.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#50. Stand-up isn't something I just sit down and start writing - it's ideas you come up with in the shower, while you're driving, waiting in line.

Chris Hardwick

#51. I had the idea of a boy who was a wizard and didn't yet know what he was. I never sat down and wondered, "What shall I write about next?". It just came, fully formed.

J.K. Rowling

#52. I don't force it. If you don't have an idea and you don't hear anything going over and over in your head, don't sit down and try to write a song. You know, go mow the lawn ... My songs speak for themselves.

Neil Young

#53. I throw ideas out into the open when I really should just be writing them down in a journal.

Dan Deacon

#54. Thank God, I'm actually infatuated and in love with what I do, therefore I am what I do. So I never have to forget [any of my ideas] because I never have to remember, I just am. I don't need to write stuff down.

Lil' Wayne

#55. Keep an idea log where you write everything down, even the bad ideas.

Joshua Schachter

#56. Songwriters can't explain. You get an idea and you don't know where it's come from. And if you're lucky, you have a pencil or pen and can write it down.

Pete Seeger