Steven Johnson wrote a brief bit about software for writers for the New York Times, and elaborated on his blog about how a professional writer uses DevonThink to store, organize and search everything.

I'm still dating OmniOutliner for my stuff, and I still love it. At first, since search is not as prominent a feature of OmniOutliner as it is in DevonThink, I resisted putting some things in an outline, with a feeling that if I can't find it by browsing, I'll never be able to find it, so I ought to keep everything well-organized. I'd been putting things in separate outline files, not putting everything in one place. I've since found OO3's "batch search" feature, the incremental search feature obligatory for every OS X app these days. Combined with the ability to limit the view to a section of the outline at a time, it's easy to keep everything in one outline. No word yet on how OO3 behaves with very long outlines; it seems easy to conclude that DT's search is faster with large collections. Plus, there's still something attractive about DevonThink's document-based approach, especially for storing long articles, clippings, or pages of notes, but I love developing ideas in a tab-in/shift-tab-out outliner too much to switch.

Steven's blog entry also convinces me that I ought to be collecting everything, especially notes about things that I read.