Welcome to our collection of notebook quotes, where we celebrate the beauty of written words and the power they hold within the pages of a notebook. Notebooks serve as vessels for our thoughts, dreams, and aspirations, capturing the essence of our innermost selves in ink. Whether it’s a leather-bound journal or a spiral notebook picked up on a whim, each page eagerly awaits the imprint of our musings, creating a timeless archive of our lives.
Throughout history, notebooks have been cherished companions to artists, writers, thinkers, and dreamers alike. From the scribbled sketches of da Vinci to the profound reflections of Virginia Woolf, these humble objects have borne witness to moments of inspiration, introspection, and revelation. Within their confines, we find solace, clarity, and a sense of connection to ourselves and the world around us.
Below, you’ll find a curated selection of quotes that pay homage to the enduring allure of notebooks and the magic they hold. Feel free to draw inspiration from these words, whether you choose to copy them onto your own pages, adorn them with stylish fonts, or transform them into captivating visuals. Let these quotes serve as a reminder of the infinite possibilities that unfold when pen meets paper, and imagination takes flight.
My father was prolific when it came to writing: day-timers, journals. He wrote on pieces of loose-leaf paper that he held on to, and he wrote in spiral notebooks. Shannon Lee
I am always looking for material – whether for my notebooks or for Twitter or Instagram – which means I’m looking for meaning. John Dickerson
Near my desk, I keep a large plastic carton filled with fresh notebooks and stationery of various kinds, sizes, and qualities. Michael Dirda
All my notebooks would be filled with lyrics instead of actual notes. Koffee
As a kid I read Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and a few others. As an adult have admired Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings and notebooks. Viggo Mortensen
I write all over the house. Because I write in longhand, I can go anywhere I want… I have some notebooks here and there, and then I type it in and pull it out, and I do the revisions all over the place. Sue Miller
I work fitfully, in hope rather than in expectation, invent methods which last a week, and fill notebooks with tiny, illegible writing which often defies my own attempts to decipher it. Anthony Minghella
I’ve been slightly obsessed with paper and notebooks. Among my most precious possessions is a small light-blue, breviary-sized volume – four-and-a-half inches wide, seven inches tall – made by a company called Denbigh. Michael Dirda
‘Memoryhouse’ came out, and there wasn’t a single review and zero sales, and after about a year, it was deleted. So I recorded The ‘Blue Notebooks’ on a little indie label, and my attitude was, ‘Well, if nobody is listening, I might as well keep doing what I’m doing’. Max Richter
I can’t predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive – no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer’s life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels. Paul Theroux
Where past generations had film cameras, scrapbooks, notebooks, and that part of the brain which stores memories, we now have a smartphone app for every conceivable recording need. Graydon Carter
When you write non-fiction, you sit down at your desk with a pile of notebooks, newspaper clippings, and books and you research and put a book together the way you would a jigsaw puzzle. Janine di Giovanni
‘Prison Notebooks’ gives me a basic understanding of how power can influence people through cultural products and intellectual groups, so they will voluntarily support the hegemony. Okky Madasari
When you’re in the band, in the van with them, there’s a lot more you know and can put pen to paper. I’ve never had any problem with my memory, and I did have these composition notebooks, like you use in school, that I wrote in. I have the largest collection of videos of the band, 400 8 and Hi8 videos. Marky Ramone
I kept notebooks as a kid, and they were important to me. Emil Ferris
I carry a small spiral notebook with me at all times and have been doing this for many years. There’s a shoe box in my closet filled with these notebooks, each riddled with notes and impressions, ideas, schemes, and soup recipes. Patrick deWitt
Gaming notebooks aren’t that abundant. Not that many gamers are able to play on notebooks. Jensen Huang
If I don’t write down a thought – or an image or a line of poetry – the instant it comes to mind, it vanishes, which explains why I have pens and notebooks in my pants and coat pockets, the car, the bicycle basket, on one or two desks in every room including bathrooms and the kitchen. Floyd Skloot
I don’t take notes. I don’t have any notebooks. I keep on trying to do that because it seems like a very writerly thing to do, but my mind doesn’t work that way. I tend to get the idea for a novel in a big splash. Zadie Smith
I have a penchant for fresh notebooks and mechanical pencils. It seems every time I go to the store, I buy a new notebook. I have dozens of them just sitting around. Richard Paul Evans
I always write my first draft in longhand, in lined notebooks. I move around the house, sitting where I like, and watch the words spool out in front of me, actually taking a lot of pleasure in the way they look in my strange handwriting on the page. Sue Miller
I remember I used to go school with guys who couldn’t afford notebooks, pens, paper: the necessary tools needed in order to survive in school. It’s a lot of kids in Gary who are at a disadvantage without that. Freddie Gibbs
There are many different kinds of PCs. You have fixed, virtual, tablets, notebooks, ultrabooks, desktops, workstations. What you find in commercial PCs, business PCs, is that there’s a really long tail of usage on client devices. Michael Dell
I can’t tell you how much money I waste on plaid shirts, whisky that I hate the taste of, and Moleskine notebooks that I never write in. Mae Martin
There came this point where I sat down with all my notebooks and I had to start to write, when I thought: this whole notion of writing for the person who understands nothing, the average reader… He has to die! I can’t have him in my head. And so the person I started writing for was the homicide detective. David Simon
I was filling entire school notebooks with stories by Grade 3. Of course, they were double-spaced, and the handwriting was huge. Linwood Barclay
While I love walking past those beautifully lit bookstores in my neighborhood, what I mostly buy there are blank notebooks and last-minute presents for children’s birthdays. Pamela Druckerman
They were written on cheap blue notebooks bought by poor women. I’m interested in folk tales in the way that medicine and magic in women’s stories are all kind of combined. Alice Hoffman
I started writing an album on flights to Africa and Brazil, but it was crazy because I left the notebook on the plane. It had seven or eight songs in it. After that, I’m not writing any more songs on notebooks – and I keep my Blackberry close! Estelle
I was my mom’s oldest child, so she was like, watching closely and taking notes, like, ‘Okay, this is what she gravitates towards,’ and she gave me all the tools to keep me focused. I liked to write; she got me notebooks. I wanted to draw; she got me sketch books and crayons and coloured pencils. Tierra Whack
I collect words and phrases and cut things out of newspapers and keep scrapbooks and write down ideas in my phone or 10,000 notebooks all around my house. It’s not very organised, but I keep collecting, so I did have a lot of material to help me to write songs. Roisin Murphy
Ever since I was a girl, I have written about one to five pages every day – on napkins, on scrap paper, in notebooks and tablets, on the walls in my room as a teenager, and in orange paint on the cheap white plastic blinds in my room. Roseanne Barr
I write with a Uni-Ball Onyx Micropoint on nine-by-seven bound notebooks made by a Canadian company called Blueline. After I do a few drafts, I type up the poem on a Macintosh G3 and then send it out the door. Billy Collins
Sunday is a likely day to write a poem. Because poetry is a piece of language flying around: you’ll find notebooks, something on your phone. It’s about finding them and getting them off that crumpled piece of paper and onto my computer. Eileen Myles
I go through all of my old notebooks, and I put an X on every page when everything has been entered into the computer, and sometimes that takes 15 years. But eventually the notebooks are full of X’s, and they’re no good to me anymore. William T. Vollmann
I always have Moleskine notebooks on my desk. I am a big journaler. Every day I write down where I went, who I spoke to and what it was all about. Richard Branson told me to do that. Alexa Von Tobel
Hoping they’d been inspired by the examples of Anne Frank and other teens who had turned negative experiences into something positive by writing about them, I handed out notebooks for my students to journal about their lives. There was some initial resistance. But then the stories poured out of them, full of anger and sadness. Erin Gruwell
For years and hundreds of thousands of miles, I drove with one knee, with the eight-track and the light dome on in the car, and a yellow pad, just writing down random ideas. I had notebooks and notebooks. The next morning, I’d go, ‘Whoa, what was I thinking?’ But there’d be one or two ideas that weren’t that bad. Roddy Piper
I had already done a lot of research for Rough Riders, keeping notebooks and old photographs. Some of the books were antiques for that time period, with the covers falling off. Tom Berenger
I established my first writing routine when I was 13. The school year had just ended, and I’d won a stack of books for being the best student in a number of subjects. The pile included several 60-leaved notebooks that I decided to fill with short stories. Ayobami Adebayo
I make notebooks for characters, and it kind of becomes a bible. Morgan Saylor
I was a serious poet for quite a while and had little notebooks filled with poetry. Denis O’Hare
When I’m in the field, when I’m working, I keep very careful notes. I wear big shirts with big breast pockets, and I carry in them two little spiral notebooks. Peter Matthiessen
When I was still in prep school – 14, 15 – I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things. John Irving
As an introverted kid who lived in the middle of nowhere, my stories made up the whole of my social life. That meant that while other kids cultivated hobbies like skateboarding or playing the piano, I sat at home scribbling in notebooks. Kameron Hurley
I’ve been writing in notebooks for 40 years or so. Frank McCourt
I’ve been collecting linguistic oddities for years and years, ever since I was small. I’ve got loads of notebooks where I’ve jotted down things I couldn’t make sense of. Susie Dent
Every student should be able to start the school year with the supplies they need, and shouldn’t feel left out if their family is unable to afford a new backpack, notebooks, and pencils. London Breed
I’m spectacularly disorganised. I wrote my latest book in seven different notebooks scattered throughout my house. Sue Townsend
I have kept journals at different times in my life. And a lot of my early notebooks became places where I would just think on the page, trying to parse what I was feeling, to find out what I was thinking. Tracy K. Smith
Insights don’t usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I’m on the move. Or half-asleep. Hilary Mantel
I am such a rewriter; I have so many notebooks filled with drafts you wouldn’t believe. Judy Blume
I was a total education geek. I loved school. I loved learning. I loved doing homework. All of my books and notebooks from high school are underlined and highlighted and there are notes all over the margins. And you know, I was a theater kid too. I was all over the place. Sophia Bush
I keep threatening to keep a formal journal, but whenever I start one it instantly becomes an exercise in self-consciousness. Instead of a journal I manage to have dozens of notebooks with bits and pieces of stories, poems, and notes. Almost every thing I do has its beginning in a notebook of some sort, usually written on a bus or train. Walter Dean Myers
I have notebooks all over the place. I write little stories for my cabaret. Anne Reid
When I started working in fashion, I didn’t have money to buy photographs, so I’d Xerox pictures from magazines and put them in notebooks. When I’d start a collection, I’d sit with my old notebooks and look through them for inspiration. John Varvatos
I was the kind of kid who couldn’t really stop making up stories during class. I didn’t do very well academically because I was always drawing these little doodles in the margins of my notebooks and I wasn’t bringing home the best grades. Meg Cabot
When Bugs Bunny walks into rehab, people are going to turn and look. People at rehab were stealing my hats and pens and notebooks and asking for autographs. I couldn’t concentrate on my problem. Eminem
In the course of writing ‘First Light,’ I climbed all over and through the Hale Telescope, where I found rooms, stairways, tunnels, and abandoned machines leaking oil. My notebooks show tooth-marks where I gripped them with my teeth while climbing around inside the telescope, and the notebooks are stained with Flying Horse telescope oil. Richard Preston
My garage/office is strewn with Post-its, cards, folders, notebooks, yoga mats and multicoloured pens, all purchased in a quest to unlock a magic way of working that will ensure my ascension to next-level creativity. Romesh Ranganathan
I work by hand, with a fountain pen, in bound notebooks I buy in India. Damon Galgut
I have notebooks and sketchbooks for ideas. I also have drawers full of envelopes covered in quick outlines, scenes or scraps of dialogue that I don’t want to forget. I tend to grab whatever’s to hand and just get the thing down before it’s lost. It’s not what you would call a streamlined system. Steven Hall
I started at 4 or 5 just writing random things down in my notebooks and making up raps. Finding words that rhyme and putting them together. Marvin Bagley III
My parents were born in 1912; they graduated from college into the Depression. They kept notebooks of every nickel they spent, and these habits of frugality from having grown up so poor never left them. Roz Chast
I started drawing when I was about 2, mostly pictures of my mother and my sister. When I got into school, instead of taking the notes that I should have been taking, I was drawing in all of my notebooks. It was an artwork thing for me at first. Megan Fox
One of my favorite stores in the Old Town is Buchbinderei. It’s this tiny stationery shop where the owner, Doris Feldman, makes these beautiful hand-bound notebooks I always buy for gifts. Daniel Humm
I spend a lot of time preparing. I think a lot about what I want to do. I have prep books, little notebooks in which I write everything down before a sitting. Otherwise I would forget my ideas. Helmut Newton
I won’t say if nerd is the right term, but I’m a big, big cricket fanatic. I just cannot stop thinking, talking cricket. I do carry notebooks and make notes to look at improving and developing my own game. Ravichandran Ashwin
Like so many aspiring writers who still have boxes of things they’ve written in their parents’ houses, I filled notebooks with half-finished poems and stories and first paragraphs of novels that never got written. Ally Carter
I’ve already got notebooks full of ideas for new music, so I’m gonna kind of nurture that just like I do all of my ideas and perfect it until it’s ready and then I’ll just let it go. Fergie
My comedy notebooks are filled with random journal entries. It’s all the same. I can look back on old joke notebooks, and know exactly what was going on in my life. Sarah Silverman
I like to believe that I don’t think of myself as a writer. I am an amateur. Back when I was teaching, I wrote when I could. Weekends were good typewriter time. Now, it’s whenever I feel there’s something to be put on paper. I don’t care what time it is, though I always write in the notebooks at night. Guy Davenport
Notebooks allow for all kinds of record-keeping, and I kept one myself as a kid. I was attracted to mixing up words and pictures freely, since that’s how I think. Marissa Moss