Quotes & Sayings About Diary Writing

Writing is the new reading — Emlyn Hall

I block in days / nights for writing where I don't touch emails or social media. — Julia Woodman

When I started writing 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid,' I was trying to write the type of book you might enjoy, put back on your shelf, and rediscover a few years later. I hope that the book finds its way into the bathroom of every kid in America. — Jeff Kinney

For whom, it suddenly occured to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. — George Orwell

I paint the way some people write an autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages from my diary. — Pablo Picasso

Because of social media, we have a lot of personal essays floating around; you see them on Facebook: everyone's either reading them or writing them. Some of them are great; some of them are diary entries put forth as essays. — Meghan Daum

I haven't got time to read books.'
'What do you mean you haven't got time? What are yo
u doing?'
'Lots of things: studying French, writing a diary,
and ...'
'And what?'
She was about to say 'waiting for the phone to ring
', but she thought it best to say nothing.
'My dear, you're still very young, you've got your
whole life ahead of you. Read. Forget
everything you've been told about books and just re
ad.'
'I've read loads of books. — Paulo Coelho

If I am unhappy, I can write "damn it" in my personal diary, but I can't do that on a microblog so I might as well not start one. — Fan Bingbing

The diary will really try and tell people who you are and what you were. The alternative is writing nothing, or creating a totally lifeless, as it is leafless, garden. — John Fowles

I would like permission to fetch a note from my mother, sir' Ridcully sighed. 'Rincewind, you once informed me, to my everlasting puzzlement, that you never knew your mother because she ran away before you were born. Distinctly remember writing it down in my diary. Would you like another try?' 'Permission to go and find my mother?' — Terry Pratchett

Writing is communication, not self-expression. Nobody in this world wants to read your diary except your mother. — Richard Peck

I put artistic values above all others. Because writing, for me, is an expanded world, a limitless world, containing all. — Anais Nin

By the time I was ten or eleven, I had a song-book and I was writing everything down. It used to just be my hobby but now it's like my diary, it's where I can go in my own little bubble. — Ella Henderson

I remember when I was younger I used to write in my diary: I want my luck to be spread. "Never give me anything too lucky all at once. I'll take a little luck now and then, but spread it for seventy years. "Now that all of this is happening, I'm sure the rest of my life will be ruined. — Robert Pattinson

Never write up your diary on the day itself, for it takes longer than that to know what happened. — Christopher Morley

Heavens, no! It could get subpoenaed. I can't write anything. When asked if she had a diary. — Hillary Clinton

I suppose the real reason Ginny Weasley's like this is because she opened her heart and spilled all her secrets to an invisible stranger." "What are you talking about?" said Harry. "The diary," said Riddle. "My diary. Little Ginny's been writing in it for months and months, telling me all her pitiful worries and woes - how her brothers tease her, how she had to come to school with secondhand robes and books, how" - Riddle's eyes glinted - "how she didn't think famous, good, great Harry Potter would ever like her. . . . — J.K. Rowling

When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things. — John Irving

Do you wonder that I avow this to you? Know, that in the course of your future life you will often find yourself elected the involuntary confidant of your acquaintances' secrets: people will instinctively find out, as I have done, that it is not your forte to tell of yourself, but to listen while others talk of themselves; they will feel, too, that you listen with no malevolent scorn of their indiscretion, but with a kind of innate sympathy; not the less comforting and encouraging because it is very unobtrusive in its manifestations."
"How do you know?
how can you guess all this, sir?"
"I know it well; therefore I proceed almost as freely as if I were writing my thoughts in a diary. — Charlotte Bronte

The day you left, it felt like I lost a diary in which I had been writing for so long. Now all that memories flashes in bits and pieces inside my head always and makes me wish that I could sit back and read it all over again. — Akshay Vasu

Now I am writing this diary in English, which for me is not the language of intimacy or love, but an attempt at distance and sanity, a means of recalling normality. — Jasmina Tesanovic

Write a true, careless, slovenly impulsive, honest diary every day of your life. — Brenda Ueland

To make my diary a little different I am going to call it a Thought Book ... I have thoughts that I never can use unlesss I write them down, for Aunt Miranda always says, Keep your thoughts to yourself. — Kate Douglas Wiggin

Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going. — Virginia Woolf

'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' is my first book, and it's the fulfillment of a life-long dream. I had always wanted to be a cartoonist, but I found that it was very tough to break into the world of newspaper syndication. So I started playing with a style that mixed cartoons and 'traditional' writing, and that's how 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' was born. — Jeff Kinney

And instead of dying Immediately after they shot him, he would go on to survive several days solely because of the cold that January. Maybe that's why we are drawn to those who posses the coldest of hearts ... In effort to survive. — Bethany Brookbank

A Writer

'Interesting, but futile,' said his diary,
Where day by day his movements were recorded
And nothing but his loves received inquiry;
He knew, of course, no actions were rewarded,
There were no prizes: though the eye could see
Wide beauty in a motion or a pause,
It need expect no lasting salary
Beyond the bounds' momentary applause.

He lived for years and never was surprised:
A member of his foolish, lying race
Explained away their vices: realised
It was a gift that he possessed alone:
To look the world directly in the face;
The face he did not see to be his own. — Philip Larkin

It's tempting to preface everything with "In my life I've found" so that people can't yell at me for being wrong (I often am) or misinformed (sure) or overly emotional (HOW DARE YOU). But this is a book about my life so I have to simply hope that unsaid disclaimer is just implied. This is my life, and my observations of it, and they change as I change. That's one of the frightening things about writing a book that no one ever tells you. You have to pin down your thoughts and opinions and then they exist on a page, ungrowing, forever. You may convince yourself that you were never stupid or coarse or ignorant but one day you reread your seventh-grade diary and rediscover the person who one day becomes you, and you vacillate between wanting to hug this unfinished, confused stranger and wanting to shake some damn sense into her. — Jenny Lawson

That night I sat up writing in my diary writing to Big Me: 'I hope you are alive ' I wrote. 'I hope that I don't die before you are able to read this. — Dan Chaon

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

Here I am, sitting at a little oak table where in old times possibly some fair lady sat to pen, with much thought and many blushes, her ill-spelt love-letter, and writing in my diary in shorthand all that has happened since I closed it last. — Bram Stoker

I could write novels about her forever. Maybe when I die I will end up in the poem with her writing more poems about our times together.' The Diary — Jeremy Limn

My parents offered me my first camera for my birthday and I developed an exclusive passion for it over the years. Since I was not the most social kid on the block, the camera helped me to express myself, invent my own language - something like a secret garden. I decided early on I would not write in a diary but take silent photographs instead. — Hedi Slimane

I'm a very compulsive person, so I spend most of my time drawing or writing my diary, patching things up and carving bits of wood - I've carved two of my guitars. — Lou Doillon

What a need we humans have for confession. To a priest, to a friend, to a psychoanalyst, to a relative, to an enemy, even to a torturer when there is no one else, it doesn't matter so long as we speak out what moves within us. Even the most secretive of us do it, if no more than writing in a private diary. And I have often thought as I read stories and novels and poems, especially poems, that they are no more than authors' confessions transformed by their art into something that confesses for us all. Indeed, looking back on my life-long passion for reading, the one activity that has kept me going and given me the most and only lasting pleasure, I think this is the reason that explains why it means so much to me. The books, the authors who matter the most are those who speak to me and speak for me all those things about life I most need to hear as the confession of myself. — Aidan Chambers

I long for the day I no longer long for him. — Franki Fiori

And the reason I am so nervous is that everything I do now is leading me to one of three possible futures ... Which one will it be? Time alone will tell. But still I know that writing this diary can perhaps provide the answer; it may even help produce the right future. — Adolfo Bioy Casares

After my husband died, I could not write much - I could not concentrate. I was too exhausted most of the time even to contemplate writing. But I did take notes - not for fiction, but for a journal, or diary, of this terrible time. I did not think that I would ever survive this interlude. — Joyce Carol Oates

She abandoned herself to his whim, thinking it was to be an orgy of eyes and hands only. — Anais Nin

I don't worry about being exposed. When I'm writing about myself I think about myself as a character. There is a ton of stuff going on in my life that I don't write about. If I need to write that stuff down, I write about myself in my diary. — David Sedaris

If you want to write for yourself, get a diary. If you want to write for your friends, get a blog. If you want to write for others ... become an author. — James Patterson

I talk to Simon, I write to him. I never used to write a diary. But now I'm writing a diary to him. I think it's not just me, but lots of others, family and friends, can still feel him around. — Petra Nemcova

I must try to set aside half an hour in some part of my day, and consecrate it to diary writing. Give it a name and a place, and then perhaps, such is the human mind, I shall come to think it a duty, and disregard other duties for it. — Virginia Woolf

I write for kids because I think the most interesting (and most humorous) stories come from people's childhoods. When I was writing 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid,' I had a blast talking on the phone to my younger brother, Patrick, remembering all of the things that happened to our family when we were growing up. — Jeff Kinney

I dream that one day I would be a published writer and people would read my books - if not, I would be living in the mountains in a small hut, near a pond where swans swim, writing a diary for myself. — Srinidhi.R

There is a difference between literature and just writing in your diary. I think perhaps the difference can be measured in degrees of pain. Hard work is also a factor. When I abandoned poetry there were so many questions lost to me as well. It remains astonishing to me the degree to which poetry has lost all value and meaning within the conditions of what I loosely refer to as corporate capitalism. Absolutely amazing. — Jacob Wren

Twenty seven years ago, during my first romantic relationship with a boy, I started keeping a diary about my thoughts and experiences. That diary formed the basis of my novel "A Dream of Two Moons," the title of which comes from some paranormal occurrences from real life. — Sahara Sanders

Joy's life in the doing (..) I mean it's the writing, not the being read that excites me. — Virginia Woolf

This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice. — Anais Nin

Occasionally a particular word or phrase in a letter or diary has sparked an entire plot - like an echo from history, still very alive. — Sara Sheridan

The preoccupation of the novelist: how to capture the living moments, was answered by the diary. You write while you are alive. You do not preserve them in alcohol until the moment you are ready to write about them. — Anais Nin

I read your diary. I KNOW. — Mary Papas

I never wrote anything down. I never kept a diary, never kept a journal. I did write one letter home about touring with the Doors that I used as a reference for the book for some details there, and then I was glad I had that, but that was it. — Linda Ronstadt

One week after moving to Rome, I started writing in my diary in Italian. — Jhumpa Lahiri

I got out this diary and read, as one always reads one's own writing; with a kind of guilty intensity. — Virginia Woolf

I haven't kept a diary since I was seventeen. I think it was soon after my baccalaureat that I gave it up for reasons I'm not sure of, because from the age of twelve or thirteen I had written one religiously... They were a record of what I had done when, down to the nearest minute. I think I held on to them as 'evidence' of some kind. They helped me to find my place in the world and, in a broader sense, to prove to myself that I really existed. I suppose I must have decided at some point that I no longer needed to do that, because I gave up writing a diary, stopped telling the story of my life and tried to just live it instead. — Antoine Laurain

I look back at the thousands of days through which I have lived, and feel awed by their inconsequentiality. My life resembles the writing in my diary (or perhaps it's the other way around): the days, like the sentences, each making a kind of superficial sense of their own, but in the context of the surrounding sentences and days, creating not a narrative or a meaning, but the very opposite: a riddle without solutions, a labyrinth without exits. A chaos. — Sam Taylor

Keep a diary, but don't just list all the things you did during the day. Pick one incident and write it up as a brief vignette. Give it color, include quotes and dialogue, shape it like a story with a beginning, middle and end - as if it were a short story or an episode in a novel. It's great practice. Do this while figuring out what you want to write a book about. The book may even emerge from within this running diary. — John Berendt

During the first months in Rome, my clandestine Italian diary is the only thing that consoles me, that gives me stability. Often, awake and restless in the middle of the night, I go to the desk to compose some paragraphs in Italian. It's an absolutely secret project. No one suspects, no one knows. I don't recognize the person who is writing in this diary, in this new, approximate language. But I know that it's the most genuine, most vulnerable part of me. — Jhumpa Lahiri

I need a moment of time for myself every day, like a child playing with his things. When I travel, I routinely find a quiet place, open my diary and write something in it. — Orhan Pamuk

My mother had always taught me to write about my feelings instead of sharing really personal things with others, so I spent many evenings writing in my diary, eating everything in the kitchen and waiting for Mr. Wrong to call. — Cathy Guisewite

One always sees the soul through words. (22 July 1922) — Virginia Woolf

I note however that this diary writing does not count as writing, since I have just re-read my year's diary and am much struck by the rapid haphazard gallop at which it swings along, sometimes indeed jerking almost intolerably over the cobbles. — Virginia Woolf

Writing my own diary is the best form of remembrance, but only for my own use. I need these notes; it's like an impulse. — Orhan Pamuk

Write a diary, imagining that you are trying to make an old person jealous. — Joe Dunthorne

[Final diary entry:] Occupation is essential. And now with some pleasure I find that it's seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down. — Virginia Woolf

To write a diary is to make a series of choices about what to omit, what to forget.
A memorable sandwich, an unmemorable flight of stairs. A memorable bit of conversation surrounded by chatter that no one records. — Sarah Manguso

Susan Griffin describes it as a time when "there is no intrinsic authority to my words." "I ... clean off my desk. I make telephone calls. I know I am avoiding the typewriter. I know that in my mind, where there might be words, there is simply a blankness. I may try to write and then my words bore me." But when the time is right, the waiting will have been worth it. "Because each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record." Excerpt from "Thoughts on Writing: A Diary," in The Writer on her Work. — Judith Barrington

Paper is more patient than people. — Anne Frank

The worse thing I have done in my life is Diary writing ... a wastage of time, wastage of papers filled with some imaginary feelings and bunch of silly activities done each day ... I cant feel any glimpse of appreciable work done by me, as whatever right I did, my Diary says " you were suppose to do it, so it was not a big deal ... huhhh ... "
I passed my last few nights in reading most of its pages ... "I laughed on the lines telling about my saddest moments and nights when I cried ... .. but I felt woeful and downhearted on the lines telling about the moments when I shared my smile with someone, when I enjoyed the moments with my friends and near and dear ones, who r far and far now, and we can't get those moments back in this busy selfish life"
So now its better in busy life to live evry day and forget it in night ... enjoy life ... save papers ... no diary writing from today ... Sorry Diary, You will Miss Me ... — Saket Assertive

All right, you caught me. I'm secretly obsessed with you and spend all my free time writing about you in my journal. 'Dear Diary, today Will was an ass for the 467th day in a row. He's so dreamy — Elizabeth Scott

Title: Teaching Writing Based on Journaling Concepts of Thoreau Thesis: Information processing generates active students. My thesis is to engage in remembering place. Through my own experience of basing my newest novel entitled The Passing Light on my own travel diary, I create strategies based on the travel journaling of Thoreau. My students create E- journals as primary sources for essays. Writing based on keen observation and self discovery is a part of learning to write. — Maryann Diedwardo

Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing. — Anais Nin

One need not write in a diary what one is to remember for ever. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

Every man is a diary in which he writes one story while intending to write another. His humblest moment is when he compares the two — Hugh B. Brown

The last chapter in 'Alice in Worcestershire' is called 'Writing the book'.
I started to write that 'Diary' chapter at the very beginning of the process and followed it through to the end... speaking to the reader.

My decision to do this was because I've often read autobiographies and wondered how the author felt and how it impacted them writing about painful memories that had been locked away in a deep forgotten place.
I wanted to know what was going in their 'present' life while they were writing; about the struggle with sharing their inner secrets and... I'm... inquisitive. (nosy)!

It took me over five years to finish 'Alice in Worcestershire' because sometimes, I was simply too drained to continue. Periodically, I updated the 'Diary' chapter and, thankfully, it's enthusiastically appreciated by readers. — Eskay Teel

I wasn't quite used to writing a diary - I didn't understand why people did it - but I wrote down notes and they went into a poem. — Benjamin Clementine

I have all these revelations as I'm writing. Each song is like a chapter of my diary. — Kid Cudi

I have kept this diary doggedly, day by day, because I believe a continuous record, no matter how full of trivialities, will always gradually reveal something of the subconscious mind behind it. I've never regretted keeping a diary yet. There are always a few nuggets of literary value under all that sand. — Christopher Isherwood

Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I've never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. — Anne Frank

Writing a diary every evening before going to bed is a good habit. We can record in the diary how much time we have devoted to our spiritual practice. The diary should be written in a way that helps us see our mistakes and correct them. It should not be a mere document of other peoples' faults or our daily transactions. — Mata Amritanandamayi

Writing for yourself is like exposing your diary. It can be a little embarrassing at times, but if it helps somebody get through the day just by hearing a song, it's well worth it. — Sevyn Streeter

The short version is that I started an internet diary a long, long time ago (six years!) because I was bored with my job. I figured I would write a few funny things a few times a week until I had enough material to do stand-up. After two or three weeks, I emailed it to some friends. They emailed it to other friends, and more people started reading. Eventually, I realized that stand-up was scary and it would be much easier to just keep writing this stuff at work. — Jason Mulgrew

There's no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice; & that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.' (26 July 1922) — Virginia Woolf

There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial ... Yes: throughout these pages I meant what I was writing and I meant the opposite; reading them again I feel completely lost ... I was lying to myself. How I lied to myself! — Simone De Beauvoir

I kept a diary as a teenager but I never would have shared it with anyone. Still, I think it's very good practice to write things down. — Judy Blume

I did not find that writing a diary with a lead male character differed in any essential way from writing one with a female character. They all had the same challenges in terms of attempting to establish an identity, coping with loneliness, friendships, relationships. — Kathryn Lasky

Your diary should be a nepenthe. — Joe Dunthorne