David McCandless Quotes

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.

In my teaching, I enjoyed creating models to clearly communicate my thoughts.

Writing, or at least good writing, is an outgrowth of that urge to use language to communicate complex ideas and experiences between people. And that's true whether you're reading Shakespeare or bad vampire fiction-reading is always an act of empathy. It's always an imagining of what it's like to be someone else.

Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind.

Easy reading requires hard writing.

When you're writing about something that happened, it helps you transition to the present. Ironically enough, by focusing on your presidency, it helps you realize that you're no longer the president. By reliving moments, it helps you stay focused on the moment.

I am an advocate of one form of the New Perspective. But there are as many new perspectives as there are people writing about it.

There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.

Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

History is a capricious creature. It depends on who writes it.

You have to be an outsider to write.

Whenever I write a song I see the whole song anyway.

I think writing for anybody helps you order your life. It helps you arrange your emotions and your thoughts and it helps to provide perspective.

Some guys need to see things on a grease board, ... I like when you can see it in your mind. And that's what Marvin does, too. He visualizes. He sees things in his mind so well.

Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice. Being part of that dialogue meant not only sitting at the table but effectively telling the African story from an African perspective - in full earshot of the world.

Part of my mind is working on how to end the thing while I'm going on. You need at least two brains to write.

As a writer you see the big picture and how you can tell as one character, how your storyline is going to meet up with all these other storylines. And as an actor you're thinking of all the minutiae, all the very small details.

I like any and all of my associations with music: writing, playing, and listening. We write and play from our perspective, and the audience listens from its perspective. If and when we agree, I am lucky.

I've learned to write the truth. But to do that, I had to figure out what the truth was-and I had to realize that the truth isn't always the same for everyone. I had to realize that my truth may not be the same as your truth.

If writing has taught me anything, it's that you don't actually understand anything until you can express it in words.

Point of view is present in anything I write, but I really try to let the subject and facts speak for themselves.

When I write fiction, I create characters whose views are not my own, and I allow them to be eloquent in defense of their, not my, views.

Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page a day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

The writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn't an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me are acts of small or large desperation. They grapple with surfaces too steep to walk in any other way, yet which have to be traveled.

There are moments when you have to write certain things and you don't have to think of your sex. If you are writing about the population of the thirteenth district in Paris, even if you are writing on the women in the thirteenth district, there's no need to consider your sex.