Notes Quotations

My writing process is such that a story will be in my head for awhile, and I'll start making notes on my computer. I create character sheets that include a character's past, fears, goals and ambitions.

Do not let yourself get in your own way. Don't judge yourself and knock yourself down. There is enough of that out there already. Remember: you are an artist, and you bring something special to this craft. Take in notes and criticism, but don't let them define you. Don't try to become a watered down version of yourself.

Faith is reason plus revelation, and the revelation part requires one to think with the spirit as well as with the mind. You have to hear the music, not just read the notes on the page.

Had we lived I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.

I tend to start with a kernel, a vague concept, and just begin to write things down - notes about a character, lines of dialogue, descriptive passages about a place. One idea fires another. I do that for about a year. By then there's a story, and I'll go on to a complete first draft that sews many of those ragtag pieces together.

The great leaders are like the best conductors - they reach beyond the notes to reach the magic in the players.

Consider what a romantic expedition you are on; take notes.

My breakthrough was when I began to write during my commute, at first taking notes on my Palm Pilot, and then moving on to writing full prose on the tiny QWERTY keyboard of my iPaq smartphone. I got so fast that I was averaging 400 words during the 35 minutes or so I spent on the subway each way, or 800 words round trip.

In Braille you write your flat sign first and then your note.

I never use notes, they interfere with me.

Most of my writing takes place at a cramped desk in a cramped apartment, so whenever I get to write on a train or make notes on a road trip, it has an entirely different cadence. And I can remember specific writing sessions while on a train through beautiful countryside in a way I can remember almost nothing else.

Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artefact of your mental illness.

It is not hard to compose, but what is fabulously hard is to leave the superfluous notes under the table.

I write box notes for Kino International, which specializes in distributing foreign films.

We start out talking about the story, trying to figure out who is who and what should happen, taking notes the whole time. Then I do a rough layout of the issue, showing what happens on each page. Then we discuss that some more.

It's always a pleasure on a personal note for me to come back to Australia.

I had been playing single note instruments and I wanted to hear a guitar played as a piano.

'What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal' was thrilling in its light, deceptive tone, its subtle but irresistible momentum.

Though music transcends language, culture and time, and though notes are the same, Indian music is unique because it is evolved, sophisticated and melodies are defined.

When I create a character, I do it with the directors, and I take their notes and try to have my notes meet in a common ground. I don't create characters myself, and I don't really think that's my job. I'm not a prep person at all - plus, I'm just a lazy procrastinator.

The Chili Peppers do a lot of improvising, but it's within the framework of song structures. The Meatbats is from a purely instrumental standpoint. But when you hear the term 'instrumental music' you think it's real serious stuff and everybody's playing a million notes and it's about playing fast. That's not what we do.

On a personal level, I send out about 20 thank-you notes a day to staffers, on all levels. And every six weeks I have lunch with a group of a dozen or so employees, to get their perspective on the business, to address problems and to get feedback.

I'd love to knock an audience cold with one note, but what do you do for the rest of the evening?

It can even be a single note which defines the entire song.

That's what it is that you rehearse - the making of music, not the playing of notes as abstractions.

It didn't make a lot of sense for us to be doing Lotus Notes implementations.

I can't even read notes. But I can teach someone how to make a guitar smoke.

Arnold Bennett was a writer I admired. He was actually taking notes at his father's deathbed.

Right now, my voice is better than ever. It changed. I have better low notes than I had before.

I have short hands. That's why I have to bend up to notes; I can't always reach the frets.

I grew up writing thank-you notes. Real, honest-to-goodness, pen-and-ink, stamped and posted letters. More than simple habit, it's about what the commitment to expressing your thoughts and feelings in writing says about the character of the writer. About the joy such notes bring to the reader.

Newt Gingrich seldom misses a chance to note that he is a historian.

You can be creative and not addictive, or addictive and not creative. Most addicted people do not produce anything of remarkable note.

Am I afraid of high notes? Of course I am afraid. What sane man is not?

And, as soon as I could put together the, you know, three or four notes that made up, like, sort of a rock and roll lick, you know, like a Chuck Berry kind of thing, I was off and running. Just completely taken over.

I've always been a fan of instructional videos. The bass-player ones are insane. The music on them is fascinating. It's not something you hear on CDs or would really ever play in bands. You listen to it and are like, 'What is happening?' It's this blizzard of notes in weird time signatures, and they're trying to teach you that.

I like hearing other writers just about the way they approach writing. It gives me energy for my own work. It's weird; I'm always taking notes about fiction when I'm listening to people talk about craft.

I hear entire symphonies, oratorios, in my head, but I can't write a note.

Often as a poet I find that I am somewhat outside an experience I want to hold onto, consciously taking mental notes or writing them down in my journal - for fear that I will forget. It's not unlike being on a trip and taking pictures, your face behind a camera the whole time - the entire experience mediated by a lens.

It is interesting to note that the 200 richest people have more assets than the 2 billion poorest.

I can hold a note as long as the Chase National Bank.

I used to take formal notes in lines of blue, and underline the key words in red, and I realised I needed only the key words and the idea. Then to bring in connections, I drew arrows and put in images and codes. It was a picture outside my head of what was inside my head - 'mind map' is the language my brain spoke.

There's something mathematically satisfying about music: notes fit together and harmony and all that. And mathematics has to do with abstractions and making connections.

I make a note, set it aside, and hope it makes sense when the time comes to look at it again.

It got a little boring I guess, playing the same note over and over.

In many college classes, laptops depict split screens - notes from a class, and then a range of parallel stimulants: NBA playoff statistics on ESPN.com, a flight home on Expedia, a new flirtation on Facebook.

I liken movies to playing a piano: Sometimes you're playing the chords and different notes with unresolved cadences and playing all major chords that are all over the place, and you're enjoying yourself with a great, simple melody.

Notes are tricky in an audition, because I find, more often than not, my instinct is right.

If I would go up on a high note, Eddie would want a low one. That's how petty the situation had become.

I took music theory for one year in high school and flunked all but one six-week period. That's because I couldn't read music, and the rest of the class was already eight or nine years into it. The teacher would sit down and hit a ten-fingered chord on the piano and you had to write all the notes down in about ten seconds. I just couldn't do it.

I always thought every day was a gift, but now I am looking for where to send the thank you note.

There are many types of silence. There is a silence before the note, there is a silence at the end and there is a silence in the middle.

I was messing around with the harmonica... but I was 13 before I got a real good note out of it.

I admit that Post-it note sheets that adhere to virtually any surface are now my substitute of choice for retention.

When I'm sniffing around new territory, I often choose, rather randomly, one general book and then follow its bibliography and notes to other, more specialized works and to the primary source material.

We stuck the record head so it kept on recording over and over on top of itself and played keyboard notes into it to create this ghost repetition melody.

Why play a chord when you can play one note?

You can alter movie singing so much because you go into the recording studio and, just technology for recording has gotten so good, you can hold out a note and they can combine a note from take 2 and a note from take 8.

You should take notes whenever you hear interesting or original language.

There's never a false note in a Berg novel.

Although cover notes for classical music albums tend to say that the trill of flutes suggests mountain streams and so on, I don't think anybody listens to music with the expectation that they're going to be presented with a sort of landscape painting.

I feel like the great filmmakers who have a true voice, yeah they take the notes, they understand the notes, but it's really about the notes underneath the notes. When you do a test screening and somebody says, 'Well, I didn't like the love story,' but it was probably just too long.

Note that I am not proposing that AI research be ignored or less funded.

I knew I really made it when my dad saw me in London and after the performance he had no notes to me and just said 'You are doing your own thing and I am proud of you.'

I still do not know where the notes will come from when I accept a commission for a new work.

I knew from the start that I wanted my life to be about music. I taught myself the notes of the piano aged three, and then I spent the next few years deconstructing chords to figure out how to play them. At 11, I researched online the sort of music school I wanted to attend, printed out the details, and handed them to my parents.

Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.

Session work makes you more strict. You can't hit notes all over the place. You've got to make each one really count.

I don't have a drawer full of ideas. I kind of look around and take notes and wonder what could actually be a whole movie. And each time, I think I'm going to do it more commercial this time; I'm going to get a big budget and make it. But I always come up with some small idea.

I've done three Broadway shows; once the curtain goes up, that's it. I mean, you prepare and you rehearse like crazy, but after opening night, the director's not there anymore, you know. He gives you notes during previews after each performance, but opening night, you're on your own.

Spike optioned my first book, 'Now the Hell Will Start,' and he trusted me to write the screenplay, too. That was an awesome learning experience - I grew up watching Spike's movies, and here he was giving me handwritten notes about structure and dialogue. His feedback taught me so much about how to craft a cinematic narrative.

I have definitely had experiences where I can feel the shift from simply living my life to being slightly outside of my life and taking notes.

I've never held myself up particularly high when I had movies that worked, and I never held myself all that low when I had failures.

For my fragrance, I knew I wanted something sweet but with a different side to it. I have a lot of vanilla notes and bakery shop scents, but then I also have muskier notes that make it a bit edgier. It's fun but also sophisticated.

First of all, we must note that the universe is spherical.

Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

In the best possible scenario, whenever you get notes from people, they're good notes, and they see things that you wouldn't have seen otherwise, and they make you a better writer.

All you have to do is play one note. But it needs to be the right note.

When The Who first started, we were playing blues, and I dug the blues and I knew what I was supposed to be playing, but I couldn't play it. I couldn't get it out. I knew what I had to play; it was in my head. I could hear the notes in my head, but I couldn't get them out on the guitar.

Searching for music is like searching for God. They're very similar. There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist.

I started drawing when I was about 2, mostly pictures of my mother and my sister. When I got into school, instead of taking the notes that I should have been taking, I was drawing in all of my notebooks. It was an artwork thing for me at first.

Children who open their lunchboxes and find mothers' handwritten notes telling them how amazingly bright they are tend to falter when they encounter academic difficulties.

It is simply not part of my culture to preserve notes. I have never heard of a writer preserving his early drafts.

I have ideas every day, and if I'm not carrying a pad of paper, I'm typing it into the notes thing on my iPhone, and it's just ridiculous - idle hands are the devil's plaything, and I can't be the devil's plaything. I got to be the devil; I got to be the guy making it all happen.

Christina can sing all the notes, but Britney is just hot!

I mean, there are only so many notes. What makes something original is how you put it together.

There are only so many notes so there must be only so many melodies.

For notes related to books I'm writing, I've wondered whether I should organize my notes better, but I do find that the action or scrolling through them and seeing odd juxtapositions of ideas helps to stimulate my own ideas and creativity. I worry that if I kept the notes in a highly-structured way, I might lose some of these benefits.

There's not a note of mine that's worth the noting.

To the audience, it's like I'm changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show's almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.

The way 'Lux' was made is that there are 12 sections in here, though two of them are joined together. So there are really 11 sections, in a sense, and each one uses five notes out of a palette of seven notes, and my palette is all the white notes on the piano. That was the original palette.

Music is a healing force. That's what good art is. That's what art is. I shouldn't say 'good' because that's an entirely personal call. It's magic, ... What is music? Where does it come from? We have the ability to take these instruments and voices and make these notes with them and do these things with them. What the heck is that? It's magic. It does what nothing else can do.

Port Symphonies is more of a composing project rather than a conducting project. The score is written in time, in seconds. The notes translate to ship horn on, then ship horn off.

I would be all over the piano, but Miles would play a few notes that would just wipe out all that fancy stuff I was playing.

Nobody else is present, no notes are taken, no Prime Minister has ever revealed what goes on.

No one has any respect for someone who can play a million notes per minute but can't put together a decent tune that someone can sing to or feel some sort of emotion from.

My concern is students not taking notes will have a lasting effect on their true mastery of the material.

My dad is in the music business in Nashville. I was the third child born in my family, and there are three notes in a chord, so that's how they came up with my name.

My father died. His ornithological knowledge, never collected or collated in anything like a comprehensible book - it was five suitcases and two trunks of scattered notes - died with him. A loss of knowledge. I made a film in small part reparation.

People want to secure a higher coupon for tomorrow's sale and they are selling. It is hard to buy notes as people assess when the BOJ will push up rates.