Note Taking Quotes

As a painter, taking photos is a form of shorthand - note-taking.

A humorist doesn't really do that much note-taking.

The Sketchnote Handbook is neither about sketching nor is it about note taking. It's about receiving and processing the world in a more complete and insightful way. It's a software upgrade for your brain. For those who've been shamed into thinking that drawing is either beyond them or beneath them, this book offers a whole new way of mastering the daily onslaught of information and turning it into raw material for discovery. (For those of us who've done this all our lives, the book provides a beautifully conceived and lovingly illustrated treat, and a great gift for our left-brained friends.)

You can see that there is scarcely an observable fact unworthy of mention in your notes, and yet you could easily spend more time scribbling than watching, and that would defeat the purpose. So be selective, don't be compulsive, and enjoy your note-taking.

Note-taking is important to me: a week's worth of reading notes (or "thoughts I had in the shower" notes) is cumulatively more interesting than anything I might be able to come up with on a single given day.

There are cinéphiles and cinéphages. Truffaut is a cinéphile. A cinéphage - a film nerd - sits in the front row and writes down the credits. But if you ask him whether it's good, he'll say something sharp. But that's not the point of movies: to love cinema is to love life, to really look at this window on the universe. It's incompatible with note-taking!

Most of the note-taking happens while I'm watching television. It's a broad window on the world, and a lot of things are already established in my mind as things I say, things that I'm interested in, things that are fodder for my [stand-up] machine. And when I see something that relates to one of them, I know it instantly and if it's a further exaggeration and a further addition, or an exception - if it plays into furthering my purpose, I jot it down.

To us, the difference between the #‎ photographer as an individual eye and the photographer as an objective recorder seems fundamental, the difference often regarded, mistakenly, as separating photography as art from #‎ photography as document. But both are logical extensions of what photography means: note-taking on, potentially, everything in the world, from every possible angle.