Harvey Mackay Quotes

The palest ink is better than the best memory.

It is therefore necessary that memorable things should he committed to writing, and not wholly betaken to slippery memory which seldom yields a certain reckoning.

If you didn’t write it down, you didn’t say it.

I've always subscribed to an old Chinese proverb that the palest ink is better than the best memory.

Memory is a wonderfully useful tool, and without it judgement does its work with difficulty; it is entirely lacking in me.... Now,the more I distrust my memory, the more confused it becomes. It serves me better by chance encounter; I have to solicit it nonchalantly. For if I press it, it is stunned; and once it has begun to totter, the more I probe it, the more it gets mixed up and embarrassed. It serves me at its own time, not at mine.

My observations are not bread crumbs. They do not dissolve. They are on record, on film printed in books, and found on the Internet. I am happy to share them. For this I was born.

I remember telling my creative writing teacher that you never want to have a journal, because if you lose it, then someone's going to know all your secrets. And then she stopped using a journal, but I always write everything down... Anytime I travel, I try and fill up notepads.

How these curiosities would be quite forgot, did not such idle fellowes as I put them down.

I've never kept a record of anything.

If there was a day that history was not recorded, then the history of one hundred days would be in peril.

Since human memory is short and does not suffice for a crowd of things, the authority of those who preceded our age, the divine emperors and kings, has decreed that those things were to be written down which the progress of fleeting time generally removes from the knowledge of men.

Things written, remain.

If You Do Not Write It, You Never Said It

I am a sponge. I don't write things down.

Pale ink is better than the most retentive memory. If it's written down, you can look it up. Just be damn sure you write it down.

Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.

It seems to me as natural and necessary to keep notes, however brief, of one's reading, as logs of voyages or photographs of one's travels. For memory, in most of us, is a liar with galloping consumption.

I like to write about certain things that if they are not written about are not going to exist.

The difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.

Everything changes as it is written down.

I do research, I read books. I write down everything that I intend to say and this may take several hours. Then when I am out there preaching, I do not carry notes.

Sometimes you just need words on a page to memorize.

Paper is at the center of so many of the elements of the development of civilization.

I think writing is an act of remembrance, I think that Instagram is an act of remembrance, and I think curating a show is an act of memory, too.

I can fake decent penmanship, but generally, it's really just terrible. And, unfortunately for me, maybe fortunately for the reader, it's very often illegible. If I get an idea, and if I do remember to write it down, which is rare, I write in such a way that I can't read a letter.