Thought Organization Quotes

I don't know what I think until I write it down.

I usually write things in my head before I ever write them down. When I write it out, usually I've already figured out what it is I'm trying to do.

Writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.

Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.

Grammar is...the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking.

The point of a notebook is to jumpstart the mind.

If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.

Writing has been an important exercise to clarify what I believe, what I see, what I care about, what my deepest values are. The process of converting a jumble of thoughts into coherent sentences makes you ask tougher questions.

A writer's notebook is the best way in the world to immortalize bad ideas. My idea about a good idea is one that sticks around and sticks around and sticks around.

My only way of processing anything for me is by writing.

I'm one of those people who doesn't really know what he thinks until he writes it down.

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

Letter writing is an excellent way of slowing down this lunatic helterskelter universe long enough to gather one’s thoughts

I don't get ideas, I have them. The trick is to remember where I've put them.

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.

I always write a thing first and think about it afterward, which is not a bad procedure because the easiest way to have consequential thoughts is to start putting them down.

Writing, for me, is an extension of thinking - it's my way of processing, and only when I've gotten something down on the page have I thought through it fully.

So it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination... And there is no mad or idle fancy that they do not bring forth in the agitation.

I read 'The Washington Post' every day from a very young age. Reading the newspaper taught me how to organize my thoughts on the page. Meaning, it taught me how to write.

My thinking process starts with my pen.

Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing.

I have always kept notebooks and I go back to them over and over. They are my compost pile of ideas.

If you want to "get in touch with your feelings," fine, talk to yourself. We all do. But if you want to communicate with another thinking human being, get in touch with your thoughts. Put them in order, give them a purpose, use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce. The secret way to do this is to write it down, and then cut out the confusing parts.

First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.

When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied . "It's so seldom I have one.