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Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses. -- Stephen King
Outlines of dead logs I hauled away remained impressed on the damp earth, scarring the ground with their funereal shapes. -- Tash Aw
"Undecided," while running for re-election to state Senate in 1998, in response to an Outlines questionnaire asking, "Do you favor legalizing same-sex marriage?" -- Barack Obama
I'm a great believer in outlines. -- Tom Wolfe
Don't write outlines; I hate outlines. -- George R. R. Martin
I'm a regular guy; I like well-defined outlines. I'm old-fashioned, bourgeois. -- Italo Calvino
There is an eternal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. -- Josephine Hart
Color in certain places has the great value of making the outlines and structural planes seem more energetic. -- Antoni Gaudi
I do outlines when I'm writing with someone, but they also need to have a certain amount of freedom. -- Anne McCaffrey
My outlines can be 10-20 pages in length and focus primarily on the physical active plot over the emotional plot. -- Tony DiTerlizzi
I am not very good at sticking to outlines, and I double back all the time to revisit scenes and change things. -- Holly Black
The future is an opaque mirror. Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face. -- Jim Bishop
Every book is like starting over again. I've written books every way possible - from using tight outlines to writing from the seat of my pants. Both ways work. -- Bruce Coville
Our retinas and brains have been wired by a hundred million years of evolution to find outlines in a visually complex landscape. This helps us to recognize prey and predators. -- Seth Shostak
I've often wished when I started a book I knew what was going to happen. I talked to writers who write 80-page outlines, and I'm just in awe of that. -- Charlaine Harris
I have a number of writers I work with regularly. I write an outline for a book. The outlines are very specific about what each scene is supposed to accomplish. -- James Patterson
For 'The Big Wander,' I probably had ten different outlines before I made myself start writing. I would sleep on each one, thinking it was wonderful, but I would always awake perceiving some flaw. -- Will Hobbs
The broad outlines of the Double Cross deception have been known since 1972, when Sir John Masterman, the former chairman of the double agent committee, controversially published his account of the operation in defiance of official secrecy. -- Ben Macintyre
The outlines of the needed psychology of becoming can be discovered by looking within ourselves; for it is knowledge of our own uniqueness that supplies the first, and probably the best, hints for acquiring orderly knowledge of others. -- Gordon W. Allport
I'm one of those writers who tends to be really good at making outlines and sticking to them. I'm very good at doing that, but I don't like it. It sort of takes a lot of the fun out. -- Neil Gaiman
In effect, Saudi Arabia legitimizes fundamentalism, religious discrimination, intolerance and the oppression of women. Saudi women not only can't drive, but are also told by some clerics that they mustn't wear seatbelts for fear of showing the outlines of their bodies. -- Nicholas Kristof
Right now I'm doing four shows at a time, trying to read four outlines every week, four scripts every week, and watching four rough cuts; it's a lot of good work. It's fun to do it, but it does wear you out. -- Aaron Spelling
I used to always make art for girls. That was the thing I did for girls to like me. I did portraits, drawings, letters that formed outlines of significant things in our relationship. Art. I just used art in general. It usually worked. -- Cary Fukunaga
Our citizens and those who have gone before us charted the broad outlines of where we need to go, and they would envy our opportunity to translate those dreams into action. And I believe they will judge us very harshly should we fail to act. -- Dave Freudenthal
Due to the sweeping time frame and the voices moving back and forth, the outline for 'The Invention of Wings' was the strangest one I've ever done. I created six large, separate outlines, one for each part of the book, and hung them around my study. -- Sue Monk Kidd
As I got farther and farther along in the series I did less and less preparation. I didn't use outlines or sketches. I just had a vague idea of what I wanted to tell and then the dialogue just came to me as I was inking the page. -- Jhonen Vasquez
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
Many writers will get a contract by selling chapters and outlines or something like that. I wrote the entire novel, and when it was all finished, I would give it to my agent and say, 'Well, here's a novel; sell it if you can.' And they would do that, and it was good because I never had anyone looking over my shoulder. -- George R. R. Martin
Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality. -- Wallace Stegner
I always begin [a novel] with outlines, but they change and so do my endings and beginnings. -- Sefi Atta
My favorite drawings at the Muhammad cartoon festival in Texas were the two chalk outlines out front. -- Evan Sayet
Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams. -- Carl Sandburg
Color in certain places has the great value of making the outlines and structural planes seem more energetic. -- Antoni Gaudi
I do outlines when I'm writing with someone, but they also need to have a certain amount of freedom -- Anne McCaffrey
It is what is painted between the outlines that makes the difference between merely competent painting and really meaningful art. -- Philip Pearlstein
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My outlines are always very goal-based. What do I want to have happen by the ending and how can I earn that. -- Brandon Sanderson
Even in the heat of a middlegame battle the master still has to bear in mind the outlines of a possible future ending. -- David Bronstein
It outlines the fact that we are twins, we grew up together, but then we went to different colleges and went in separate directions. -- Paula White
For all my longer works (i.e. the novels) I write chapter outlines so I can have the pleasure of departing from them later on. -- Garth Nix
Not what we think, but what we do, / Makes saints of us: all stiff and cold, / The outlines of the corpse show through / The cloth of gold. -- Alice Cary
In light this bright, after so long in the dark, everything we can see is only black and white. Only glaring shape-outlines we have to blink against. -- Chuck Palahniuk
Politics is the womb in which war develops - where its outlines already exist in their hidden rudimentary form, like the characteristics of living creatures in their embryos. -- Carl von Clausewitz
I don't see how anybody starts a novel without knowing how it's going to end. I usually make detailed outlines: how many chapters it will be and so forth. -- John Barth
A tendency toward the abstract is inherent in linear expression: graphic imagery being confined to outlines has a fairy-like quality and at the same time can achieve great precision. -- Paul Klee
An old minister explained the smudges on his sermon outlines by saying they were caused by sweat and tears. And without those two marks, a sermon is not a sermon. -- Vance Havner
My advice to any young person at the beginning of their career is to try to look for the mere outlines of big things with their fresh, untrained and unprejudiced mind. -- Hans Selye
The end (goal) of art is to figure the hidden meaning of things and not their appearance; for in this profound truth lies their true reality, which does not appear in their external outlines. -- Joseph Conrad

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