Top 344 Outline Quotes & Sayings

A mother's example sketches the outline of her child's character.

Nature has no outline. Imagination has.

I read round the subject, I make a skeleton outline, and then I start work in the relevant archives. During the marshaling of the material, I copy the material from each archive file across to the relevant chapter in the skeleton outline.

I have an outline but never use a teleprompter. That kills the connection.

Well, first you have to love writing. A lot of authors love having written. But I enjoy the actual writing. Beside that, I think the main reason I can be so prolific is the huge amount of planning I do before I start to write. I do a very complete, chapter-by-chapter outline of every book I write. When I sit down to write, I already know everything that's going to happen in the book. This means I've done all the important thinking, and I can relax and enjoy the writing. I could never write so many books if I didn't outline them first.

An outline is crucial. It saves so much time. When you write suspense, you have to know where you're going because you have to drop little hints along the way. With the outline, I always know where the story is going. So before I ever write, I prepare an outline of 40 or 50 pages.

I never know what's going to happen in a novel. I don't have a plan or an outline.

A lot of people think that they are really cool because they don't outline. In my writing group, they would say, "I will never outline. I let the characters take me." C'mon, man - I outline the story, but it's only like one page. It's a list of possible reversals in the story, like things where everything will just change because of this certain reveal or this certain action. Then I start really digging into the character because, to me, I don't care what the story is.

There was hope in him, and soon perhaps the outline of his journey would take form.

I never work from an outline, and often I don't know how the story will end.

The way I outline has changed quite a bit from when I first started writing.

I outline fairly extensively because I'm usually dealing with real events. I don't need to give myself as much information as I used to, but I still like to have two pages of outline for every projected 100 pages of manuscript.

I like to make an outline or cards and then utterly ignore them.

I cannot outline. I do not know what the next thing is going to happen in the book until it comes out of my fingers.

I never work from an outline, and often I dont know how the story will end.

There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite a word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.

Normally, I spend a week on the outline and take two weeks to write the book.

I don't write with an outline. I don't often know what I'm going to do as I'm writing. And I do everything by feel and by instinct.

Coaches who can outline plays on a black board are a dime a dozen. The ones who win get inside their player and motivate.

Animals outline their territories with their excretions, humans outline their territories by ink excretions on paper.

No, no. I draw the line there. Anything that's going to show an outline of my manhood is not on.

Writing is difficult. It's a time commitment, it's labor and I'd have to get myself to sit down and actually do the work and outline.

I binge write, basically. I do a lot of prep, research, setup. I'll have a pretty detailed outline. Sort of like a beat outline. And then I'll add little notes and dialogue ideas, and I'll just create a 20-page document.

I am a big outliner. For my adult book, 'The Visibles,' I did not outline, and it took me two years to write because I just didn't outline, and I had no path.

I am a big proponent of writing a great outline. That way you can avoid hitting a roadblock. There is no worse feeling than writing yourself into a corner but if you've figured it all out in the outline then you won't have that problem.

I don't start a novel until I have lived with the story for awhile to the point of actually writing an outline and after a number of books I've learned that the more time I spend on the outline the easier the book is to write. And if I cheat on the outline I get in trouble with the book.

I write all day and outline stories, a sports mythological universe.

Nobody would know me from my own description of myself; which is why, when called upon (rarely, I grant) to provide an account, I tailor it, I adapt, I try to provide an outline that can, in some way, correlate to the outline that people understand me to have -- that, I suppose, I actually have, at this point. But who I am in my head, very few people really get to see that. Almost none. It's the most precious gift I can give, to bring her out of hiding.

I try to outline. I'm a lazy outliner. I will put the points down of each chapter or series of chapters, but it always changes. For me it's a place of evolution. I don't really know who the characters are. I don't really know what the story is. I outline and that really just gets me moving. It's like I'm drawing up fake maps, but they turn out to be correct.

the car, by bisecting the human outline, diminishes it, producing a race of half-people in a motion not of their own making

She'd cried over a broken heart before. She knew what that felt like, and it didn't feel like this. Her heart felt not so much broken as just ... empty. It felt like she was an outline empty in the middle. The outline cried senselessly for the absent middle. The past cried for the present that was nothing.

I always work from an outline.

What are Raphael's Madonnas but the shadow of a mother's love, fixed in permanent outline forever?

I don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.

In my stand-up, I generally improvise from an outline.

My technique, starting with a quick outline in pencil, is designed to record first impressions, with no time for second thoughts.

I don't think I'm anything like the improviser. I'm not. I do better with at least an outline.

I really don't keep an outline; I don't organize in any way. I just write.

When I pictured myself, it was always like just an outline in a colouring book, with the inside not yet completed.

If ever I were to have a symbol attributed to me, it would be a heart, the outline!

Tax reform exists, sort of, as an outline - miles away from being actual passed legislation.

We envy others, for we see their lives in broad outline, while forced to live ours in every detail.

For the novels I wrote before selling anything, I didn't outline much. I had a vague idea of the story.

I'm a big fan of outlining. Here's the theory: If I outline, then I can see the mistakes I'm liable to make. They come out more clearly in the outline than they do in the pages.

The research is the easiest. The outline is the most fun. The first draft is the hardest, because every word of the outline has to be fleshed out. The rewrite is very satisfying.

I never outline. I don't work from an outline. I have no idea where the book is going. I mean, even two-thirds of the way through, I don't know how it's going to end.

If you do outline, you have to be aware of the problems that that kind of thing can cause.

The entire purpose of the State of the Union Address is for the president to outline where we stand as a nation.

The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.

The only way for us to make sense of life today is to appreciate where the future is going. Scripture outlines that future, not with detailed dates, but with a general outline of what is to come. That outline is designed not to have us prepare charts, but to prepare our hearts.

You have to take the basics of feminism and the kind of outline of it and do what you do with it. You have to make things work for your own life.

There is an eternal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outline all our lives.

I write almost purely by instinct. I've never made an outline.

What I have to outline is action and plot because I'm not particularly good at that.

I envy those writers who outline their novels, who know where they're going. But I find writing is a process of discovery.

I outline and outline and outline, and then I'm very specific about the stuff I write. That's my process.

I am a writer who works from an outline. What I generally do when I build an outline is I find focal, important scenes, and I build them in my head and I don't write them yet, but I build towards them.

I always have a basic plot outline, but I like to leave some things to be decided while I write.

Our starting-point must be the fact that God cannot be named... no mind has yet contained or language embraced God's substance in its fullness. No, we use facts connected with Him to outline qualities that correspond with Him, collecting a faint and feeble mental image from various quarters. Our noblest theologian is not one who has discovered the whole - our earthly shackles do not permit us the whole - but one whose mental image is by comparison fuller, who has gathered in his mind a richer picture, outline, or whatever we call it, of the truth.

The outline is 95 percent of the book. Then I sit down and write, and that's the easy part.