Quotes About Writing Journals

#1. I got a bit obsessed with the whole English language and was writing journals and poetry. I've always been intrigued about psychology and philosophy and how people's minds work.

Lara Pulver

#2. 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

#3. I write constantly, but only in my journals. I have three of them: one for travel, one for home, and one I write in before bed. But the last thing I want is other people reading it ... What's really fun is reading your journal, like a year later ...

Cameron Diaz

#4. Journaling has become one of the most gratifying and fulfilling practices of my life. Not only do I derive the daily benefits of consciously directing my thoughts and putting them in writing, but even more powerful are those I have gained from reviewing my journals.

Hal Elrod

#5. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.

Grace Paley

#6. It took years of keeping journals to trust a simple fact: like life in transit, the writing inside is often fragmented, messy.

Alexandra Johnson

#7. I've been writing an ongoing letter to my children since they were born, full of recollections of their childhoods. I've filled two journals. It's a great thing to do as a mother - you forget a lot as you go along, but reading over what you've written brings all the memories back.

Tory Burch

#8. Writing time is for writing, not for checking e-mail, reading the news, or browsing the latest issues of journals. Sometimes I think it would be nice to download articles while writing, but I can do that at the office. The best kind of self-control is to avoid situations that require self-control.

Paul J. Silvia

#9. I got a little bit lost in the writing process: like, that moment in the 'Fight Song' music video where I'm throwing the crumpled paper on the bed, that was really true life. I was filling journals with different possibilities of lyrics for the first verse. And none of them felt right.

Rachel Platten

#10. I have four shelves covered with journals that I've written. Dad and I are writing songs together. I've probably written 100 songs.

Miley Cyrus

#11. Who I love reading is Jordan Mechner, who wrote 'Prince of Persia.' He put all his journals while he was writing 'Prince of Persia' online.

Mike Krieger

#12. Isn't it mysterious to begin a new journal like this? I can run my fingers through the fresh clean pages but I cannot guess what the writing on them will be.

Maud Hart Lovelace

#13. Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing- singing, laughing, learning.

Sylvia Plath

#14. I've kept journals at many times in my life starting from when I was about 13 or 14. But it's boring and contrived to keep a journal every day. Better to write as the mood strikes.

Erica Jong

#15. When I was growing up, I had no idea that I could possibly become a writer. I wrote endlessly in journals - a practice I maintained for a long time, well into the writing life I had no idea I could ever have.

Dani Shapiro

#16. I love writing. I've always written journals. I loved writing the book on living alone.

Barbara Feldon

#17. I don't really write journals and stuff and then adapt them to music, it's completely within the form of the song. My great obsession and basically the bane of my existence is caring probably too much about every word, but it's too late to change my career path.

Emily Haines

#18. We will read books together inside the blanket and stay warm. And keep writing poetry in our respective journals. Time will fly but we will still remain inside the blanket forever.

Avijeet Das

#19. Music was never just a hobby for me. I'd pick up a guitar every day to work on whatever I was writing at the time. I would put my ideas in songs the way some people might put them in diaries or journals.

Tracy Chapman

#20. One of my favorite things I read was John Steinbeck's journals while he was writing 'East of Eden,' which was so cool.

Paul Dano

#21. My best writing has always been in journals.

Thomas Merton

#22. Adam Berenson knows how to compose, organize an ensemble, do musical research, play solo and trio piano, write for musical journals, and enlist others to his cause. A very fine musician.

Paul Bley

#23. The journals may give you an opportunity to express your feelings without inviting further tables.

David Patneaude

#24. My journals were a clearing house - a garbage can. Once I was writing seriously, I understood that this was the stuff that didn't belong in my work.

Dani Shapiro

#25. I published only in academic journals in philosophy until I was in my 40s, but I had been writing fiction and poetry my whole adult life - without ever once trying to publish it, and rarely letting anyone read it.

Cheryl Mendelson

#26. For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.

May Sarton

#27. I was never really satisfied with writing only text or with the way my texts looked when they were published. Most online journals have a pretty lame sense of typography - bad font, counter-intuitive margins and line spacing - that it makes me sour on my writing.

Masha Tupitsyn

#28. Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.

Sylvia Plath

#29. Successful journals break the deadlock of introspective obsession

Alexandra Johnson

#30. Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.

Will Self

#31. These empty pages are your future, soon to become your past. They will read the most personal tale you shall ever find in a book.

Anonymous

#32. I remember looking at James Joyce's journals. It was just amazing - it looked like ants had written on the page. So much writing on one page, every corner of the page was filled. Some of the lines were underlined in yellow or blue or red. A lot of color, intense writing.

Juan Felipe Herrera

#33. Ideas are not in textbooks and journals, Ideas are more deeper than the shallow written works of men. You are the idea that comes like an idea.

Michael Bassey Johnson

#34. Often as writers, we are surprised by what we learn about ourselves. It runs counter to what we've thought about who we are. But it is closer to the truth.

Rob Bignell, Editor

#35. I blame myself for not often enough seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Somewhere in his journals, Dostoyevky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pry and dig away long enough, and lo!, soon he will hit upon the marvelous.

Saul Bellow

#36. When I was 13, I started writing songs, and it fell into my lap all of a sudden. I wrote poems and journals, but that's when it switched for me to songwriting. That's when I wanted to do everything. It was like a fire all of a sudden. I started coming to Nashville and moved here when I was 15.

Kelsea Ballerini

#37. I write journals and would recommend journal writing to anyone who wishes to pursue a writing career. You learn a lot. You also remember a lot ... and memory is important.

Judy Collins

#38. I wish I could keep a journal. I have a lot of journals with one page half written in. I sometimes will write myself a quick email on my Blackberry when I think of something.

Louis C.K.