Quotes about notebook

A collection of quotes on the topic of notebook, idea, making, thinking.

Quotes about notebook

“When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

Books

“Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his Notebooks: “It should not be hard for you to stop sometimes and look into the stains of walls, or ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud or like places in which … you may find really marvelous ideas.”

C.G. Jung book Man and His Symbols

Source: Man and His Symbols

Idea

“And at last we've got to the end of this ideal racecourse! Now that you accept A and B and C and D, of course you accept Z."
"Do I?" said the Tortoise innocently. "Let's make that quite clear. I accept A and B and C and D. Suppose I still refused to accept Z?"
"Then Logic would take you by the throat, and force you to do it!" Achilles triumphantly replied. "Logic would tell you, 'You can't help yourself. Now that you've accepted A and B and C and D, you must accept Z!' So you've no choice, you see."
"Whatever Logic is good enough to tell me is worth writing down," said the Tortoise. "So enter it in your notebook, please. We will call it
(E) If A and B and C and D are true, Z must be true.
Until I've granted that, of course I needn't grant Z. So it's quite a necessary step, you see?”

Lewis Carroll book What the Tortoise Said to Achilles

"I see," said Achilles; and there was a touch of sadness in his tone.
"What the Tortoise Said to Achilles", Mind, n.s., 4 (1895), pp. 278–80

Sadness, Help

“Throughout his life he would quote and write in his Notebooks chunks of John Donne, Edward Jones, John Betjeman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Dunbar, Shakespeare and his greatest read Dylan Thomas. Dylan became his hero. Sweetly, their paths would later cross and a good friendship would grow.”

Richard Burton (1925–1984) Welsh actor

Biography, in "Life: Richard Burton"

Life, Friendship, Quotes, Reading

“Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

Secret, Joy

“To lose a passport was the least of one's worries. To lose a notebook was a catastrophe.”

Bruce Chatwin book The Songlines

The Songlines (Penguin, 1987, ISBN 0140094296, p. 160

“My dream is to walk around the world. A smallish backpack, all essentials neatly in place. A camera. A notebook. A traveling paint set. A hat. Good shoes. A nice pleated (green?) skirt for the occasional seaside hotel afternoon dance.”

Maira Kalman (1949) Israeli American artist and creator of children's books

Source: The Principles of Uncertainty

World, Dreams, Shoe, Travel

“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.”

Will Self (1961) English writer and journalist

Idea, Memory

“I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

Source: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

“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.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Source: A Short History of Nearly Everything

Idea

“You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast

Variant: I belong to this notebook and this pencil.
Source: A Moveable Feast

“Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

“It is my first morning of high school. I have seven new notebooks, a skirt I hate, and a stomachache.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Speak

Source: Speak

Hate, School

“I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Beauty, Waiting

“The seeds of who I am now had been planted. I wrote in my notebook one day during ethics class.”

Marilyn Manson (1969) American rock musician and actor

Source: The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

“If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door.”

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

Cats, Lovers, Past

“She'd rather hoped for something simple, like a lined piece of notebook paper with MY EVIL PLAN written across the top, but no luck.”

Cassandra Clare The City of Lost Souls

Source: City of Lost Souls

Hope, Evil

“Oh tell me where the answer lies,
Is it in the notebook behind your eyes?”

Neil Young (1945) Canadian singer-songwriter

Speakin' Out
Song lyrics, Tonight's the Night (1975)

“The "sayings" of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude toward the world and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech — it is a gift from heart to heart.”

Willa Cather (1873–1947) American writer and novelist

"Miss Jewett"
Not Under Forty (1936)

Life, World, Way, Feeling

“I fly to Luxembourg on Berlusconi's usual twin engine, who accompanies us, glad to exhibit himself and exhibit his status in an international ceremony. The gold medal (but is it really gold?) is given to me by Gaston Thorn, head of the Luxembourg government. Berlusconi fills his notebook with addresses: of all the V. I. P.'s that he has met. He's a true climber that takes advantage of everything and throws nothing away.”

Indro Montanelli (1909–2001) Italian journalist

Luxembourg, 23 may, from accounts with myself. [citation needed]
2000s - 2010s

Flying

“About five years ago, somebody showed me some web sites that had my material all over them, and I thought that was fascinating. One reason was, I'd never seen my jokes written one right after another like that. I write on drawing paper—I don't even like lines on the paper—so I have notebooks all over the place with handwritten pieces of my act in them. So to see it go by, all typed out neatly, was like, "Wow." And then two or three years ago, someone showed me a site, and half of it that said I wrote it, I didn't write. Recently, I saw one, and I didn't write any of it. What's disturbing is that with a few of these jokes, I wish I had thought of them. A giant amount of them, I'm embarrassed that people think I thought of them, because some are really bad.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

Interviews

People, Thinking, Drawing

“The idea for [his sculpture] 'The Warrior' came to me at the end of 1952 or very early in 1953. It was evolved from a pebble I found on the seashore in the summer of 1952, and which reminded me of the stump of a leg, amputated at the hip. Just as Leonardo says somewhere in his notebooks that a painter can find a battle scene in the lichen marks on a wall, so this gave me the start of The Warrior idea. First I added the body, leg and one arm and it became a wounded warrior, but at first the figure was reclining. A day or two later I added a shield and altered its position and arrangement into a seated figure and so it changed from an inactive pose into a figure which, though wounded, is still defiant... The head has a blunted and bull-like power but also a sort of dumb animal acceptance and forbearance of pain... The figure may be emotionally connected (as one critic has suggested) with one’s feelings and thoughts about England during the crucial and early part of the last war. The position of the shield and its angle gives protection from above. The distance of the shield from the body and the rectangular shape of the space enclosed between the inside surface of the shield and the concave front of the body is important... This sculpture is the first single and separate male figure that I have done in sculpture and carrying it out in its final large scale was almost like the discovery of a new subject matter; the bony, edgy, tense forms were a great excitement to make... Like the bronze 'Draped Reclining Figure' of 1952-3 I think 'The Warrior' has some Greek influence, not consciously wished…”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote from Moore's letter, (15 Jan. 1955); as cited in Henry Moore on Sculpture: a Collection of the Sculptor's Writings and Spoken Words, ed. Philip James, MacDonald, London 1966, p. 250
1940 - 1955

Pain, War, Feeling, Idea

“I often find poems hand written in old abandoned notebooks.”

Dermot Healy (1947–2014) Irish writer

Penguin Group (2013) A Conversation with Dermot Healy http://www.us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/long_time_no_see.html, Penguin US, accessed May 5, 2013

“Personal computing today is a rich ecosystem encompassing massive PC-based data centers, notebook and Tablet PCs, handheld devices, and smart cell phones. It has expanded from the desktop and the data center to wherever people need it — at their desks, in a meeting, on the road or even in the air.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

"The PC Era Is Just Beginning" in Business Week (22 March 2005) http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2005/tc20050322_7219.htm <br class="br">2000s

People, Personality

“It was around 1935 or 1936 that I first had the idea of compiling a history of art – not in the usual way, but considering only the fads that have succeeded one another down through the ages. For example, the infatuation in Roman times with broken pleats and heads turned in profile.... or during the epoch of Pérugin and Raphael, a certain blue that appears everywhere. I wanted to draw up an inventory of these vogues. To this end I visited museums, took notes in little notebooks, and made demonstrative sketches of paintings. For this purpose I preferred bad paintings, by which I mean those held to be mediocre by aesthetes, but in which these fads that interested me were clearly in evidence.”

Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) sculptor from France

Source: posthumous, Batons rompus, 1986, pp. 17, 18

Age, Art, Way, History

“How did I think up my drawings and my ideas for painting? Well I'd come home to my Paris studio in Rue Blomet at night, I'd go to bed, and sometimes I hadn't any supper. I saw things, and I jotted them down in a notebook. I saw shapes on the ceiling..”

Joan Miró (1893–1983) Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist

from: Miro, on English Wikipedia
Miró's quote on 'automatic painting and drawing', explaining the start of his work 'Harlequin's Carnival' he made in Paris, strongly admired then by Surrealists like André Breton
1915 - 1940

Home, Idea, Thinking, Drawing

“A week after the attack, one is free to taste the bile of its atrocious ingenuity. It is already trite — but stringently necessary — to emphasise that such a mise en scène would have embarrassed a studio executive's storyboard or a thriller-writer's notebook ("What happened today was not credible," were the wooden words of Tom Clancy, the author of The Sum of All Fears). And yet in broad daylight and full consciousness that outline became established reality: a score or so of Stanley knives produced two million tons of rubble.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

"Fear and loathing" (2001)

Fear, Reality

“The Golden Notebook for some reason surprised people but it was no more than you would hear women say in their kitchens every day in any country. … I was really astounded that some people were shocked.”

Doris Lessing (1919–2013) British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer

As quoted in an undated profile at the BBC World Service http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/arts/features/womenwriters/lessing_being.shtml

Women, People, Country

“As soon as I get an idea, I write a short story, or I start a novel, or I do a poem. So I have no need for a notebook. I do keep files of ideas and stories that didn’t quite work a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago. I come back to them later and I look through the titles.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

The Paris Review interview (2010)

Idea

“Even the managers. It was all a feudal style of management. If we had accepted that style, we would not have grown. It was simply not a scalable model. Of course, the easiest thing would have been to follow it. But we had a disruptive style of management. So we said, 'we don't want people carrying their wisdom in notebooks as if it is some kind of secretive operation.”

Mukesh Ambani (1957) Indian business magnate

Mukesh Ambani on how Reliance was built

Wisdom, People, Secret

“In his famous book, What is Life?, Erwin Schrödinger asks, "What is the source of the order in biology?" He arrives at the idea that it depends upon quantum mechanics and a microcode carried in some sort of aperiodic crystal—which turned out to be DNA and RNA—so he is brilliantly right. But if you ask if he got to the essence of what makes something alive, it's clear that he didn't. Although today we know bits and pieces about the machinery of cells, we don't know what makes them living things. However, it is possible that I've stumbled upon a definition of what it means for something to be alive.
For the better part of a year and a half, I've been keeping a notebook about what I call autonomous agents. An autonomous agent is something that can act on its own behalf in an environment. Indeed, all free-living organisms are autonomous agents. Normally, when we think about a bacterium swimming upstream in a glucose gradient we say that the bacterium is going to get food. That is to say, we talk about the bacterium teleologically, as if it were acting on its own behalf in an environment. It is stunning that the universe has brought about things that can act in this way. How in the world has that happened?”

Stuart Kauffman (1939) American biophysicist

The Adjacent Possible: A Talk with Stuart Kauffman, 2003

Life, Books, World, Food

“I used to do Grade Exams, but my mum will tell you I didn't over-practise for them at all. I never practised, just played. I loved to play. I loved to play a lot* If one mistake is made with young children, it is trying to make them practise rather than just letting them play.' She played hymns at church ('My parents were very religious when we were young') and 'all the Top of the Pops number ones next morning at school. Things like David Bowie's "Life On Mars". That's got a very good piano part. And ever since I was six or seven years old, I always liked Bach - that's why I recorded the Anna Magdalene Notebook, little 16-bar preludes that Bach wrote for children.' I was amazed at how serious the other kids were about the whole thing, much more disciplined than I was, and with this attitude of "Ooh, I can't play sports because I might hurt my fingers" or "I can't listen to pop music because that's really terrible.”

Joanna MacGregor (1959) British musician

Childhood

Love, Life, Children, School

“And me I'm in my bedroom drawing in my notebook
Because my hand thinks I'm an artist
But my heart knows I'm a poet
It's just words they mean so little to me.”

Conor Oberst (1980) American musician

Saturday as Usual
A Collection of Songs Written and Recorded 1995-1997 (1998)

Thinking, Heart, Drawing

“He had a notebook: he'd take it, list through it and sing every song one by one over the radio. The chetniks would sing him Ceca and Vesna Zmijanac, and he would sing for them Zaim Imamović and Safet Isović.”

Jusuf Prazina (1962–1993) Bosnian mobster

Adnan Solaković http://www.bhdani.com/arhiva/260/t26008.shtml

Singing

“I am late with the new Doris Lessing [The Golden Notebook]. I make no apology: it has taken me a long time to read (568 pages of close print) and at the end of it all I feel cheated. This talented writer has attempted an experiment which has failed, essayed a scale which is beyond her…. This is a book of revolt – political, social, sexual. Anna [the heroine] became a Communist in South Africa, seeing in Communism a "moral energy" not to be found in other creeds or in the long-entrenched privileged class. Anna is also concerned with being a "free woman" – rebelling against traditional male dominance – and with achieving maximal erotic fulfilment…. There is no doubt about the great moral virtues here – intelligence, honesty, integrity – but it is the aesthetic virtues that seem to be lacking. The characters do not really interest us: when we have dialogue it is strangely unnatural … Mrs Lessing’s old singleness of vision, her strength as a writer, is not to be found here. [Review in the English provincial newspaper the Yorkshire Post, 1962]”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

People, Joseph Conrad, Doris Lessing

Books, Feeling, Intelligence, Communication

“I can only look from the outside (or cut into the inside, but flesh and genes do not reveal organic totality). I am stuck with a panoply of ineluctably indirect methods - some very sophisticated to be sure. I can atomize, experiment, and infer. I can record reams of data about behaviors and responses. But if I could be a beetle or a bacillus for that one precious minute - and live to tell the tale in perfect memory - then I might truly fulfill Darwin's dictum penned into an early notebook containing the first full flowering of his evolutionary ideas during the late 1830's: "He who understands the baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke."”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"Can We Truly Know Sloth and Rapacity?" pp. 376
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Behavior, Flowers, Idea, Understanding

“[Dubuffet marvels at the desert as a chaotic palimpsest, filled with marks and signs].. like an immense notebook of disorganization, a notebook of improvisation.... an elementary school blackboard full of scribbles..”

Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) sculptor from France

Quote of Dubuffet, in a letter to Jacques Berne mailed from Algeria, late 1940's; (Lettres à J.B., p. 35.); as cited in 'Dubuffet, Lévi-Strauss, and the Idea of Art Brut', Kent Minturn http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/faculty/Minturn/Dubuffet-Levi-Strauss.pdf, from RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 46, Polemical Objects (Autumn, 2004), pp. 247-258, p. 250 <br class="br">1940's

School

“He was more than willing to instruct me, and in my notebook he actually wrote in his own hand the three commandments he considered sufficient to make any firm prosper: 1. There’s no need for a man to know how to work, but if he doesn't know how to make others work, he is doomed. (2) There is only one great regret: not having acted in one's own best interest. (3) In business, theory is useful, but it can be utilized only after the deal has been made.”

Italo Svevo book Zeno's Conscience

Era dispostissimo ad istruirmi, ed anzi annotò di propria mano nel mio libretto tre comandamenti ch'egli riteneva bastassero per far prosperare qualunque ditta: 1. Non occorre saper lavorare, ma chi non sa far lavorare gli altri perisce. 2. Non c'è che un solo grande rimorso, quello di non aver saputo fare il proprio interesse. 3. In affari la teoria è utilissima, ma è adoperabile solo quando l'affare è stato liquidato.
Source: La coscienza di Zeno (1923), P. 52; p. 63.

Business

“He began to think about semblance, as Ansky had discussed it in his notebook, and he began to think about himself. He felt free, as he never had in his life, and although malnourished and weak, he also felt the strength to prolong as far as possible this impulse toward freedom, toward sovereignty. And yet the possibility that it was all nothing but semblance troubled him. Semblance was an occupying force of reality, he said to himself, even the most extreme, borderline reality. It lived in people's souls and their actions, in willpower and in pain, in the way memories and priorities were ordered. Semblance proliferated in the salons of the industrialists and in the underworld. It set the rules, it rebelled against its own rules…it set new rules.”

Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) Chilean author

2666: A Novel (2008)

Life, Pain, People, Way

“The man to watch, the man to put your money on, is not the man who wants to make "a survey" or a "more detailed study" but the man with the notebook, the man with the alternative hypotheses and the crucial experiments, the man who knows how to answer your Question of disproof and is already working on it.”

John R. Platt (1918–1992) American physicist

John R. Platt (1964). Cited in: William M. Block, M. Dale Strickland, Bret A. Collier, Markus J. Peterson (2008) Wildlife Study Design. Springer. p. 20 among other places.

Money, Question, Study

“But I was miserable. I hurt inside. I didn’t have the peace of mind that Jesus promised if we did his work. I didn’t have the very thing I preached. Finally, in January of 1956 when I had but six months to go on my tour of duty, I made up my mind to settle it once and for all. I made a final study of the Bible and wrote down everything that sounded true in a notebook on my right. Those things that sounded wrong or inconsistent or that I couldn’t believe, I wrote in a notebook to my left. For three months, between 3:00 and 7:00 A. M., sitting under a single bulb in the attic above the barracks, I made a comparative study of the Synoptic Gospels. When I finished, the left-handed notebook was completely filled with chapter and verse and reasons why I could not believe in Christianity. The right-handed notebook contained about two pages of homilies on love. So I gave up Jesus and the Baptist Church.”

Oscar Zeta Acosta book Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

Source: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), p. 133.

Love, Peace, Study, Hurt

“Within those confining walls, teachers — a bunch of men all armed with the same information — gave the same lectures every year from the same notebooks and every year at the same point in the textbooks made the same jokes.”

Yukio Mishima (1925–1970) Japanese author

"Cigarette" ("Ta- bako") story, quoted in 三島由紀夫短編集: Seven Stories, translated by John Bester (2002), p. 110.

Men, Teachers

“I am a diehard romantic. My all time favorite romantic movie would be Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa. Waheeda Rehmanji’s role in the movie is something I would love to do in my career. My role in Aashiqui 2 had shades that came close to it. Also, Titanic and The Notebook are on my favourite films list. My idea of romance revolves around everything I’ve grown up watching in our Bollywood movies. Our romances are like fairy tales, something that every romantic freak, especially girls would love to experience.”

Shraddha Kapoor (1987) Indian film actress & Singer

I’m a diehard romantic - Shraddha Kapoor via Filmfare (April 30, 2013) http://www.filmfare.com/interviews/im-a-diehard-romantic-shraddha-kapoor-3014.html

Love, Girl, Idea, Time

“He had this nasty habit of pulling out a little notebook in the middle of a conversation and jotting down, as he said, “story ideas.” Later on, after I’d transferred to S.F. State and taken his writing course, he asked me if I wanted to read his first draft of Wake Up, Stupid! I kept it for a week and returned it to him at the next short story seminar. I only read the first paragraph. After that, I was no longer afraid of the intellectuals. I knew I could tell a better story.”

Oscar Zeta Acosta book Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

Source: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), p. 100.
Context: Since I was about ten years younger than this crew of alcoholics, I just listened and filled their cups with cheap wine. After they’d had enough, I’d tell them of my escapades in Riverbank and in Panama where I’d worked with the Southern Baptist Convention and Jesus Christ to save the black souls of niggers, spics and Indians. I used to keep my eye on Harris when I told my stories. He had this nasty habit of pulling out a little notebook in the middle of a conversation and jotting down, as he said, “story ideas.” Later on, after I’d transferred to S. F. State and taken his writing course, he asked me if I wanted to read his first draft of Wake Up, Stupid! I kept it for a week and returned it to him at the next short story seminar. I only read the first paragraph. After that, I was no longer afraid of the intellectuals. I knew I could tell a better story.

Stupidity, Idea, Reading

“Usually, I take great pleasure in finding a notebook that’s going to match the subject matter. And this time, for some reason, I was in a hurry. I hadn’t found the right one, I had started my research, and I couldn’t wait for the perfect notebook. So, I just grabbed one that I had. It’s the first time though, and it felt a little sad.”

Tracy Chevalier (1962) American writer

On choosing a notebook for each novel that she writes in “An Interview with Tracy Chevalier” https://fictionwritersreview.com/interview/an-interview-with-tracy-chevalier/ in Fiction Writers Review (2019 Sep 23)

Pleasure, Sadness, Time, Waiting

“Photography is more than a means of recording the obvious. It is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever, whether it be a face or a flower, a place or a thing, a day or a moment. The camera is a perfect companion. It makes no demands, imposes no obligations. It becomes your notebook and your reference library, your microscope and your telescope. It sees what you are too lazy or too careless to notice, and it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.”

Aaron Siskind (1903–1991) American photographer

Aaron Sussman, cited in: The Amateur Photographer's Handbook, (1973), p. vi
Sussman, Aaron. The Amateur Photographer's Handbook. Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1973.

Love, Making love, Way, Feeling

“His greatest delight was in dreaming up a new costume, a talent he displayed early on... One year he transformed his sister into King Neptune with a bodice made of shells and raffia skirt …Never without a notebook, he scribbled down ideas as they occurred to him.”

Christian Dior (1905–1957) French fashion designer

In p. 13
Christian Dior: The Man who Made the World Look New

Dreams, Idea, Sister

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

And then two or three years ago, someone showed me a site, and half of it that said I wrote it, I didn't write. Recently, I saw one, and I didn't write any of it. What's disturbing is that with a few of these jokes, I wish I had thought of them. A giant amount of them, I'm embarrassed that people think I thought of them, because some are really bad.
[The Tenacity of the Cockroach: Conversations with Entertainment's Most Enduring Outsiders, Thompson, Steven, 2002, Three Rivers Press, 0609809911, September 9, 2012, http://www.avclub.com/articles/steven-wright,13796/]
Interviews

Drawing

“Another old-fashioned practice I maintain is carrying a notebook, a small one I keep in my shirt pocket and never leave the house without. In it I register all the little things that strike me, not in great detail but just quickly. The following morning I'll review what I jotted down and look for the most meaningful moment in the previous day, the one in which I felt truly present.
It's worth mentioning that this is my edit. It wasn't easy revisiting what are now 156 volumes of my diary.”

David Sedaris (1956) American author

"Introduction". p.6, 7 [Page numbers per the 2017 Little, Brown hardback UK edition.]
Theft by Finding: Diaries, Volume 1 (1977-2002) (2017)

Fashion, Housing

“When I first went to Mexico in 1974 and was involved in Chicano teatro—Mexican American guerilla theater—I realized that my politics and my poetry could merge; suddenly it wasn’t just for me. Before then, I didn’t share this poetry; I kept it in notebooks…”

Lorna Dee Cervantes (1954) American writer

On how her politics and poetry merged in “A Conversation with Lorna Dee Cervantes” https://www.academia.edu/4464223/A_Conversation_with_Lorna_Dee_Cervantes in World Literature Today (2010)

“In a rainstorm, everyone quickly runs down the street with umbrellas, raincoats, newspapers over their heads. Writers go back outside in the rain with a notebook in front of them and a pen in hand. They look at the puddles, watch them fill, watch the rain splash in them.”

Natalie Goldberg book Writing Down the Bones

Essay, "Living twice". p.53
Writing Down the Bones (1986)

“First, consider the pen your write with. Think, too, about your notebook. […] A cheap spiral notebook lets you feel that you can fill it quickly and afford another. Also, it is easy to carry.”

Natalie Goldberg book Writing Down the Bones

Essay, "Beginner's mind, pen and paper". p.5, 6
Writing Down the Bones (1986)

Feeling, Thinking