Capturing Thoughts Quotes

I've always got a notepad on or a voice recorder recording ideas.

Writing is like listening to a melody line in my head. Note by note, it knows where it wants to go. I follow it and lay it down. I can pare it, shape it, and polish it later...My job is to take down the dribs and drabs - to free-associate, if you will, knowing that the associations have their own plans for where we're going with all this.

Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped.

He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world.

I obviously have a knack for getting on paper what a lot of people have thought and didn't realize they thought. And they say, 'Hey, yeah!' And they like that.

To seize the flying thought before it escapes us is our only touch with reality.

I don't keep a diary or a journal. Sometimes I'll send emails to friends, and that's a way of recording what I was thinking at any given time. But I've never been a journal keeper.

Ideas? My head is full of them, one after the other, but they serve no purpose there. They must be put down on paper, one after the other.

If something pops in my mind and it's easy, I write it.

When I was kid, they always used to tell me to keep notebooks. I look at my shelves now and it's just nothing but notebooks. And if I haven't gotten an idea but I have time to work, I'll pull one out and I bet there will be five or six sentences that will kick me off.