Mary Oliver Quotes

I tend to wake up in the middle of the night with ideas crying to be documented.

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast - talk them or write them down.

It's kind of a mysterious process, but something will catch my attention, and I'll make a note about it. I may even write a few pages about it, and then I'll put it aside, but I'll sort of keep it in mind. Then as time goes on, other things will gather to it as if it's a magnet, almost, and eventually, there's enough to make the story.

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.

Yeah, I record on voice memos. I got like 1,000-something memos. If I'm in the middle of something and I can't get it done, I'll jot it down, but I never write a rap out, ever.

Those golden minutes before you are completely awake, when your mind is just drifting, you have no censorship; you are ready to develop any kind of idea. That's when I come up with the best and worst ideas. That is the privilege of being a writer - that you can stay in bed for an hour in the morning and it's work time.

Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.

I have notebooks and sketchbooks for ideas. I also have drawers full of envelopes covered in quick outlines, scenes or scraps of dialogue that I don't want to forget. I tend to grab whatever's to hand and just get the thing down before it's lost. It's not what you would call a streamlined system.

I find a lot of writing happens when you're not actually at the computer. So I carry a notebook.

I carry a small spiral notebook with me at all times and have been doing this for many years. There's a shoe box in my closet filled with these notebooks, each riddled with notes and impressions, ideas, schemes, and soup recipes.

Every day, I think of designs, but I don't write them down, and I forget. If only I had an office.

I keep a notebook of ideas, and sometimes ideas form in your head that you just have to write down, or you'll forget them.

We have so much inspiration. It's everywhere... So I always have a pen with me and a laptop, and I write everything down.

I used to just scribble things on a piece of paper whenever an idea would - came to mind. Now with cell phones. It definitely has gotten a lot easier because I can just take it out and just - I'll just sing into my phone.

I have these huge black foam boards on the wall, and tacked to them, I have these white punch cards with my story ideas, scenes and notes.

I believe in working with your morning brain - you have your coffee, and then maybe you'll start thinking about the grand plan and what's going to happen in the next arc, and then you write for a while, and then you get really dreamy, and over the course of the day or in the middle of the night, something comes, and you just throw it in!

I can write all the way through the morning, when my mind is clear, and there are no distractions.

I usually don't write at night, but there are times where I wake up at 3 in the morning and write all night.

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

I'm the guy that gets up at three in the morning to jot down an entire sheet of lyrics for something that won't be recorded for six months. You have to get it down when you can, because thoughts are fluid.

I've often said that there's no such thing as writer's block; the problem is idea block.

When I need the idea, I can find it immediately. I have a horror of rewriting or deleting; the parts of my composition are carried in my head 'till I can write them down, even to the last note. Then I do not alter a jot.

If I don't write down a thought - or an image or a line of poetry - the instant it comes to mind, it vanishes, which explains why I have pens and notebooks in my pants and coat pockets, the car, the bicycle basket, on one or two desks in every room including bathrooms and the kitchen.

My morning begins with trying not to get up before the sun rises. But when I do, it's because my head is too full of words, and I just need to get to my desk and start dumping them into a file. I always wake with sentences pouring into my head.

When the ideas are coming, I don't stop until the ideas stop because that train doesn't come along all the time.