Wallace Stevens Quotes

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.

Today I start a diary; it is against my usual habbits, but out of a clearly felt need.

Now I say I'm a diarist with an explanation I'll get back to you on. Someday I may try and write in memoir form.

I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.

My songs are just little letters to me.

My diary has its own kind of magic. It gives me the feeling of having accomplished something. On days when I don't have time for this, I feel tortured.

I swear, you are the only person I know who makes decisions based on what will provide the best material for a diary.

A person loves to review his own mind. That is the use of a diary, or journal.

In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.

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.

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.

My diary seems to keep me whole.

To keep a diary is to attempt a difficult literary form. Its effectiveness is likely to derive from a special blend of honesty and appetite for life that gives the power to record everyday happenings while magically freeing them from banality and triviality.

I was already in a groove and decided to initially write down everything, as I would in an actual diary, and then go back and take out what I was too shy to reveal. But I wound up leaving more in than I imagined, and that was because I wanted to be transparent and real.

I don't keep a journal.

I don't write about my life in my column.

I used cartoons as diaries. I still do. They're my way of figuring out the world, what's happening to me or what I'm thinking about.

I've always written down how I feel.

Who knows better than artists how much ugliness there is on the way to beauty, how many ghastly, mortifying missteps, how many days of granitic blockheadedness and dismaying ineptitude there is on the way to accomplishment, how partial all accomplishment is, how incomplete?

When I sit down with my notebook, when I start scribbling words across the page, I find out what I'm feeling.

I used to love writing in my journal.

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.

I hit 'record' whenever I'm going through a really hard time. I don't listen to it for a couple of days, so I have some perspective. If it's too personal to share, and I feel like would alienate the listeners, then I usually don't share that stuff.

I have kept journals at different times in my life. And a lot of my early notebooks became places where I would just think on the page, trying to parse what I was feeling, to find out what I was thinking.

I write in a diary every night to collect my thoughts. It's very therapeutic to songwrite, because it's the same thing.