Margin Notes Quotes

Old Arabic books, printed in Bulaq, generally have a broad margin wherein a separate work, independent of the text, adds gloom to the page.

I filled the margins of my schoolbooks with lyrics.

I save everything. I have these carefully organized file boxes. Somewhere in there is a section of the 'New York Times' where I wrote 'The Border Guard' in the margin.

I like to smell a book before I start it. I fold over the pages, write comments in the margins, leave it on the bed next to my pillow when I fall asleep.

I am still a lover of paper books. One of my first jobs was in a bookstore, and I still like to be able to write in a margin and feel the paper. Once inside of a digital device, I end up losing things.

Ever since high school I've been writing in a spiral notebook, in pencil. Everything looks too polished on a computer when you start writing, and I can't really see it. I feel like the words are much more naked in pencil, on a notebook. I feel that my brain works differently, and words come out differently, if I have a pencil in my hand, rather than if I have a keyboard. I tend to add more in the margins. I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.

The year after I graduated college I had a job in a library. When people underlined passages in the library books, or made notes in the margins, the books were sent to me. I erased the lines and the notes. Yes, that was my job.

Most of 'All Hail West Texas' was written during orientation at a new job I had. I had basically worked this job before, I knew this stuff, so I was writing lyrics in the margins of all the Xeroxed material.