51 Quotes about diary-writing
- I swear, you are the only person I know who makes decisions based on what will provide the best material for a diary.
Rob Thomas, Rats Saw God
- People who keep journals have life twice.
Jessamyn West
- My body is my journal, and my tattoos are my story.
Johnny Depp
- Diaries are for the down and dirty, the stuff you don’t want people to ever find out about you. Journals are the things you leave open around the house, hoping a literary agent will wander in, read it and declare you the next genius of your age.
Lani Diane Rich
- Every great thinker keeps a journal.
Trenton Lee Stewart, The Mysterious Benedict Society
- If you read someone else’s diary, you get what you deserve.
David Sedaris
- Everyone should keep someone else’s diary.
Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde
- This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.
Anaïs Nin
- In the journal I am at ease.
Anaïs Nin
- Everyone should have a form of a diary, it’s a great release.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
- I owe a good deal to this journal. By unburdening my mind on paper I feel, as it were, in some degree to get rid of it.
Anne Lister
- What a comfort is this journal. I tell myself to myself & throw the burden on my book & feel relieved.
Anne Lister
- Tonight I write this journal entry on my laptop. Other nights I have handwritten entries in notebooks. Sometimes I jot down notes as I ride home in the cab or wait for an appointment. I want all of this—everything and everyone—to stay with me.
Paula Huntley, The Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo
- Isabel, much to my annoyance, mentioned my keeping a journal, & setting down everyone’s conversation in my peculiar hand-writing (what I call crypt hand).
Anne Lister
- The looking over & filling up my journal to my mind always gives me pleasure. I seem to live my life over again. If I have been unhappy, it rejoices me to have escaped it; if happy, it does me good to remember it.
Anne Lister
- He acknowledged keeping a journal. So did I, & we promised not to note down anything against each other.
Anne Lister
- But it was my journal that frightened people. She had made up her mind not to open her lips before me.
Anne Lister
- Dear Diary
You are greater than the Bible
And the Conference of the Birds
And the Upanishads
All put together
Leonard Cohen
- Dear Diary
I mean no disrespect
But you are more sublime
Than any Sacred Text
Sometimes just a list
Of my events
Is holier than the Bill of Rights
And more intense
Leonard Cohen
- Do you really keep a diary? I’d give anything to look at it. May I?
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
- When you re-read your journal you find out that your latest discovery is something you already found out five years ago.
Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas
- I should rather like to tear these last pages out of the book. Shall I? No—a journal ought not to cheat.
Dodie Smith
- I could manufacture excruciating embarrassment in the privacy of my bedroom, simply by reading what I’d written in the journal the day before. Its pages faithfully mirrored my fraudulence and pomposity and immaturity.
Jonathan Franzen, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History
- My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.
Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories
- The great theme of the private journal in the 20th century is sickness.
Alan Pauls
- Sometimes she imagines sticking her head in an oven.
But she doesn’t.
She just writes it all down in her journal and waits.
She is waiting for someone to see.
Gabrielle Zevin, Love Is Hell
- What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed
- There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed
- A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person. Nobody dares to make the final confession to themselves on paper: or at least, not about love.
Lawrence Durrell
- The first lock I opened was on your diary. Don’t worry, I read two pages and fell asleep.
Jude Watson, A King’s Ransom
- Seventy-five years ago a young woman kept a diary in which she wrote some of her innermost thoughts, many of the daily happenings, and all of the weather.
Bess Streeter Aldrich, The Lieutenant’s Lady
- I always say, keep a diary and someday it’ll keep you.
Mae West
- I do not keep a diary. Never have. To write a diary every day is like returning to one’s own vomit.
Enoch Powell
- It would be curious to discover who it is to whom one writes in a diary. Possibly to some mysterious personification of one’s own identity.
Beatrice Webb
- —Everyone knows diaries are just full of crap.
—Yes, I know that. I was just buying you a new one.
Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones and Mark Darcy), Bridget Jones’s Diary
- At last I have worked thro’ this fag of a journal! I have been at it almost incessantly ever since our return from France.
Anne Lister
- “I see what you think of me,” said he gravely—”I shall make but a poor figure in your journal tomorrow.”
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
- Memory is the diary that chronicles things that never happened or couldn’t possibly have happened.
Oscar Wilde
- Only good girls keep diaries, bad girls don’t have time.
Tallulah Bankhead
- Each new day is a blank page in the diary of your life. The secret of success is in turning that diary into the best story you possibly can.
Douglas Pagels
- A great library contains the diary of the human race.
George Mercer Dawson
- It’s an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary; not only because I have never done so before, but because it seems to me that neither I—nor for that matter anyone else—will be interested in the unbosomings of a thirteen-year-old school girl.
Anne Frank
- Write a diary, imagining that you are trying to make an old person jealous.
Joe Dunthorne, Submarine
- Journal writing is a voyage to the interior.
Christina Baldwin
- Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
Pablo Picasso
- If I can only write my memoir once, how do I edit it?
S. Kelley Harrell
- If you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you.
Madeleine L’Engle
- I did keep a travel diary once and it was a big mistake. All I remember of that trip is what I bothered to write down.
Alex Garland, The Beach
- He started keeping a journal—had been, in fact, secretly doing so for some time: the furtive act of a deranged person.
Philip K. Dick, VALIS
- Just because I wear black and keep a private journal, that doesn’t mean I’m going to blow up the school.
Kelly Creagh, Nevermore
