Quotes About Writing Things Down

#1. Well, I hear things," she began. "And ... well, writing things down? I suppose that's a suitable job for a lady, isn't it? It's practically cultural.

Terry Pratchett

#2. I love writing things down so pretty much every card I send to friends or family is an over enthusiastic essay. I've written some pretty good ones in my time.

Rae Morris

#3. :They spend a quarter of their lives writing things down, a quarter finding what other people have written down, a quarter hiding what was written down, and a quarter making sure if it should have been written down and wasn't, it is now.:

Mercedes Lackey

#4. Always being myself and my salve, which is life. I'm not lonely, if that's what it seems like. Always writing things down.

Chris Campanioni

#5. I've certainly been someone who has loved to mine the trials and tribulations of growing up in general, and the people who are in our lives, and I don't mind pulling from them and writing things down on my phone that my family says.

Jim Rash

#6. I have a terrible superstition of writing things down.

Andrew Scott

#7. If you become very self-conscious about what you are doing, you kill. You kill the character. Then it doesn't work. You have to come from a sincere place. And you don't think too much. I don't go to the hotel and I start thinking what am I going to say tomorrow and start writing things down.

Antonio Banderas

#8. Until then I'll keep writing things down, both the things I make up and the things that have happened. It is the way I've learned to see my life.

Ann Patchett

#9. If I had had a thing like an iPad when I was a kid, then I never would have gotten into the habit of writing things down by hand.

Joe Haldeman

#10. In some ways. I always feel between worlds, between cultures, and I think that's not necessarily a bad place for a writer to be. Writers are kind of on the fringe anyway, observing, writing things down. I'm still mostly American, but it's a nice tension.

Patrick Ness

#11. Some of the best things that have happened in my stories have happened seemingly of their own accord. The writer becomes a listener, just writing things down as they come.

Will Hobbs

#12. I lost my voice. I'd never had to cancel a show before and I had to walk around with a pad and a pen, writing things down.

Paul McCartney

#13. 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

#14. I could always imagine more interesting places to be than where I was. And more interesting people than me being there. Eventually, this led to making up stories and writing things down.

Susanna Clarke

#15. Composing was more difficult than writing things down.

Benjamin Clementine

#16. 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

#17. We all gotta die, and we all gotta live with the things our dark sides do. People are afraid of their darkness, though. Spend their whole lives so scared of dyin' that they never get to live. Spend their whole lives pushin' down that darkness, until there ain't no light at all.

Suzanne Palmieri

#18. You should give it to Max, Liesel. See if you can leave it on the bedside table, like all the other things." Liesel watched him as if he'd gone insane. "How, though?" Lightly, he tapped her skull with his knuckles. "Memorize it. Then write it down for him.

Markus Zusak

#19. Instead of noting down things I'm unlikely to forget, I will write a poem. Even if I have never written one before and even if I never do so again, I will at least know that I once had the courage to put my feelings into words.

Paulo Coelho

#20. Use original detail in your writing. Life is so rich, if you can write down the real details of the way things were and are, you hardly need anything else.

Natalie Goldberg

#21. I have the exact opposite problem of every writer I've ever met: Every writer I've ever met writes things that are too long, and they have to edit them down.

Fran Lebowitz

#22. I don't sit down with a goal of writing. I read books or magazines. I watch TV. I go to the doctor. I get on airplanes. I live a normal life and sometimes I'll notice something or read things or experience things.

Brian Regan

#23. Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he's far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can't afford self-doubt and he can't let other people's opinions, even a father's, keep him from writing.

Wallace Stegner

#24. Every night before you go to bed write down three things good that happened to you that day. That's pretty much all it takes to get a happiness boost over time.

Eric Barker

#25. I try to write about small insignificant things. I try to find out if it's possible to say anything about them. And I almost always do if I sit down and write about something. There is something in that thing that I can write about. It's very much like a rehearsal. An exercise, in a way.

Karl Ove Knausgard

#26. I don't like to make a distinction between the writer and the painter , finally , because I do both things anyway . Everybody's dreaming and trying to put down their dreams in the way that their hand knows best . I feel as much a unity , as much comradeship , with painters as I do writers .

Clive Barker

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

Phil Cooke

#28. I wanted to be a writer, so I became one. How? I wrote things down.

Ariel Gore

#29. Paper is to write things down that we need to remember. Our brains are used to think.

Albert Einstein

#30. The little things. Perhaps it is these trivialities I have been writing down in my book, these small hooks on which my whole life is hung.

S.J. Watson

#31. I have to feel something emotionally on the story to be able to write for it. I turn things down if I don't feel I'm really right to tell that particular story.

Howard Shore

#32. 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

#33. The changes are part of my writing process. When I write, I imagine scenes. I write things down. I take photographs. I do some casting. I rewrite. It's a permanent making or remaking.

Pawel Pawlikowski

#34. For years I've advocated keeping a gratitude journal, writing down five things every day that brought pleasure and gratefulness.

Oprah Winfrey

#35. It's so sad that no one writes down the things we go through, and even worse - no one will ever know about it, no one will ever see or hear about it, no one will ever be able to restore.

Javier Marias

#36. Writing is not magic. It's a craft, a process, a set of steps. As with any process, things sometimes break down. Even in a good story, the writer runs into problems. So the act of writing always includes problem solving.

Roy Peter Clark

#37. I believe in the moment of things and fate and things happening for a reason, so I write things down and I trust it.

Ellie Goulding

#38. I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced ...

Ernest Hemingway,

#39. A letter is always better than a phone call. People write things in letters they would never say in person. They permit themselves to write down feelings and observations using emotional syntax far more intimate and powerful than speech will allow.

Alice Steinbach

#40. 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

#41. I'll write down and catalogue all the different devices that are Americana to me, and I try to have a historic depth and breadth and also the things that we do in our time, the type of vamps and chants, things that are available to us.

Wynton Marsalis

#42. Yesterday I went home with him and we did the usual things. I haven't the nerve to put them down, but I'd like to, because now when I'm writing it's already tomorrow and I'm afraid of getting to the end of yesterday. As long as I go on writing, yesterday is today and we are still together

Graham Greene

#43. My writings are an exploration, and I think a lot of writers would tell you this, but in writing, you're not simply putting down things that are already known to you. You're actually discovering in the writing process, you're actually creating knowledge.

Alan Lightman

#44. As I suspect is true of many who write for a living, as I write I think about all sorts of things. I don't necessarily write down what I'm thinking; it's just that as I write I think about things. As I write, I arrange my thoughts. And rewriting and revising takes my thinking down even deeper paths.

Haruki Murakami

#45. I don't really get things very ... intuitively. I mean, I don't immediately understand things. The only way I really get it is by writing it down.

Joan Didion

#46. Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down "Desolation Row." I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it.

Patti Smith

#47. My writing has always been a rather non-linear process. I've found if I get something down, I can listen to it and other things start to come.

Pauline Oliveros

#48. Writing is very hard mostly because until you try to write something down, it's easy to fool yourself into believing you understand things. Writing is terrible for vanity and self-delusion.

Mark Vonnegut

#49. I walk around and think about things. When I come across a thought that makes me laugh, I write it down. Then, at night, I say the thought to people through a microphone. I don't think about politics or pop culture very much, so those thoughts don't often make it to the microphone.

Demetri Martin

#50. I do a lot of research for my books. I can't possibly know all the things I write about and I love learning new things. I spend hours and hours doing research in books, libraries and online. [Once] I traveled to the reservation to get the settings and the flavor of the place down right.

Linda Conrad

#51. I was always a keen reader. I jotted down one or two things, but it never occurred to me to think of a job in writing. I thought that writers were like demi-gods. I don't know what I thought.

Penny Jordan

#52. The first thing on Dr. Amen's master to-do list, the first thing he sees each day, is his gratitude list. Rather than just writing down a few things, he keeps a running tab on what he is grateful for, looks at it every day, and adds to it as joyful moments occur.

Rick Warren

#53. I have to start writing down things that happen, or I'll forget my life entirely.

Josh Lieb

#54. Such things and deeds as are not written down are covered with darkness, and given over to the sepulchre of oblivion.

Ivan Bunin

#55. A writer doesn't dream of riches and fame, though those things are nice. A true writer longs to leave behind a piece of themselves, something that withstands the test of time and is passed down for generations.

C.K. Webb

#56. The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.

Paul Auster

#57. There are two things John and I always do when we're going to sit down and write a song. First of all we sit down. Then we think about writing a song.

Paul McCartney

#58. I suppose ... in writing you can't have regrets. I mean, you just get it down the way it was ... it's only wishful thinking that things could be other than they were.

John McGahern

#59. The day it comes out, there's already things that you start to go, 'Oh, I should have done that a little differently.' You start to make a list in your head. I actually write things down
what I'm going to do next time.

Howie Day

#60. Being a mother has absolutely forced me. You have to write things down and have systems for all of it. And then you set up systems and you realize they don't work.

Maggie Gyllenhaal

#61. I always felt that nobody was going to understand me, going to understand what I felt about things. I guess that's why I started writing. At least on paper I could put down what I thought.

Truman Capote

#62. It never occurred to me that there was anything odd about writing my own music, and so I used to just jot down little ditties and things like that. And it was only in later years I suppose when I was about nine or so, that I realised there was this thing called composing.

Richard Meale

#63. During the course of the day, I write things down, things I don't do anything with. Then, when I get ready to start recording, I just look through my books and I see if I can find something that stands out. That's how I come up with the off-the-wall-kinda-strange-indirect-stuff.

Bootsy Collins

#64. One of the great things about writing middle-grade books is that it's really a nice break, when you're writing super intense stuff like 'Coldtown', to be able to write something a little lighter - calm down and do something different.

Holly Black

#65. Young writers should read books past bedtime and write things down in notebooks when they are supposed to be doing something else.

Daniel Handler

#66. It helps to write down half a dozen things which are worrying me. Two of them, say, disappear; about two of them nothing can be done, so it's no use worrying; and two perhaps can be settled.

Winston Churchill

#67. You have to have a plan. Everything has to be planned. For me, I start with the title of my album, before I even start with the songs. I write down different things that I want album to say, and then the songs come from the different words.

Mary J. Blige

#68. Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.

Sylvia Plath

#69. I love comedy and I would write things to myself as an exercise in writing. I didn't do well for years, and I quit. I started to break down why I was afraid and started to look at people I admired, like Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Freddie Prinze, George Carlin and all.

George Lopez

#70. I think things evolve into jokes. I don't generally write them down as jokes. I talk them out.

Marc Maron

#71. Time can't be managed. I merely manage activities. Each night, I write down on a sheet of paper a list of the things I have to accomplish the next day. And when I wake up ... I do them.

Earl Nightingale

#72. Let me write it down, quite unambiguously: paper could cut me open as a paper knife slits paper. I'd like to meet the person who could make a new woman of me out of the things I say.

Elfriede Jelinek

#73. When you do a writing job for a studio, one of the things you want to do is satisfy the expectations of your employer. That's a little bit different than when you sit down and write something to satisfy yourself, because then you're the employer.

Joel Coen

#74. Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears ...

Jack Kerouac

#75. Books provide context and allow you to think about things over time. Film is like writing haiku; there is an immense amount of pleasure in paring down and paring down. But it isn't the same.

Geoffrey Ward

#76. Odette nodded at my notebook, where I was writing as she spoke. 'Do the people in America really want to read this? People tell me to write these things down, but it's written inside of me. I almost hope for the day when I can forget.

Philip Gourevitch

#77. I never had any lessons. When I first started playing I used to read music. I was very interested in music. But when I started playing in groups I did a silly thing and dropped it. It's great if you can write things down.

John Bonham

#78. If you want to write ... keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair.

Madeleine L'Engle

#79. Did you know that writing stories down kills them?
Of course it does, words aren't meant to be stiff, unchanging things.

N.K. Jemisin

#80. I know the benefits of having a really great improv show are amazing because it was this one rare and fleeting thing that was incredible, but the risk just didn't appeal to me. I liked the control of sitting down and writing things.

Allison Tolman

#81. Things were about to change. If nothing changed, I wouldn't be writing this down because this is a book about the time when everything changed. And isn't that what every book is about? No, seriously, isn't it? I don't read books.

David Iserson

#82. I don't have a computer. I am the Luddite of rock'n'roll, I don't have a portable phone. I write things down.

Elton John

#83. When I was younger, I suppose I was interested in checking out as much about writing as I could: bad, weird, irritating, even things not-to-my-taste. Now I am less open. I will decide after a few pages if I want to stay in the world of the book, and if I don't, I put it down. I have less time left.

Susan Minot

#84. I'm not the fastest reader or writer but occasionally I'll write things down just so I don't forget them.

Thighpaulsandra

#85. I wrote. I wrote all the things I couldn't say to him. I wrote about how much I believed in us. I wrote about how much I trusted God. I wrote that I was praying for him. I wrote down all the jokes I could remember, which weren't many.

Kimberly Novosel

#86. I need to say to you. There are things in your life that only you will see, stories that only you will hear. If you don't tell them or write them down, if you don't make the picture, these things will not be seen, these things will not be heard.

Emmet Gowin

#87. Mother calls up the stairs to ask what in the world I'm typing up there all day and I holler down, 'Just typing up some notes from the Bible study. Just writing down all the things I love about Jesus.

Kathryn Stockett

#88. The important thing is not to be too comfortable when you're writing. Noise in the street? That's good. The computer goes down? That's good. All these things are good. It has to be a little bit of a struggle.

E.L. Doctorow

#89. When you actually sit down to write some code, you learn things that you didn't get from thinking about them in modeling terms ... there is a feedback process there that you can only really get at from executing some things and seeing what works

Martin Fowler

#90. I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don't even know I'm working on. It's a free lunch. A free dinner. I don't know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

Charles Bukowski

#91. My writing process is very organic. I start with an idea. I have the general story arc and the cast. But then I sit down to write, and things change.

Sarah Addison Allen

#92. I know who the real hero is, and it isn't me or brave Lanaya. It's an old man with a white beard and a walking stick and a heart so big it won't let him stop thinking he can change the world by writing down things in a book no one will ever read.

Rodman Philbrick

#93. To be a writer is to connect and to play and to attempt to see clearly and understand. It astounds me regularly that feeling things deeply and writing them down is basically my job description.

Deb Caletti

#94. I try to remember the things that keep me peaceful, happy, and compassionate. I constantly write notes on my phone about little discoveries I make in terms of perspective and habitual thought patterns. My memory seems to let me down, so this really helps me.

Richard Brancatisano

#95. 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

#96. For the first few years I wrote jokes and performed them word for word and then wrote tags for them and did that word for word and that worked pretty well. Now, I do almost all of my writing on stage and then record and listen for any new things and then I write those down.

Gary Gulman

#97. I finish a lot of lyrics while I'm in the water and it's always pretty constructive for me to get out in the water. I'm not actually writing the words down, but I have time to think about words, and doing a lot of surfing usually gives me a little space and peace of mind to finish things up.

Jack Johnson

#98. Anything said is gone as soon as it leaves my lips. Things written down at least have a chance to leave a soft echo of what had been.

Chris Dietzel

#99. I write things down because my thoughts get too heavy in my head and it hurts my neck.

Joyce Rachelle

#100. Basically what I'm trying to say is that when you get down to the nitty gritty of song writing, it is very logical to a certain degree. It requires a bit of intuition as to how things can fit together elegantly.

Vienna Teng