Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

Memoirs are - memory is - rarely 100 percent accurate. Any autobiography is a construct, ballpark, even unnatural. Private diaries, too, can be unreliable - a detail that matters only if the diary is read.

It's not easy keeping a diary. You have to be pretty committed.

I always kept a diary - not a diary like, 'Dear Diary, we got up at 5 A.M., and I wore the weird hair again and that white dress! Hi-yeee!' I'd just write.

I'm sure it won't surprise you to learn that I kept a diary - actually, quite a number of them over the years.

Keeping a diary is like closing your bedroom door and refusing to come out until dinnertime: it is a declaration of self.

My diary seems to keep me whole.

As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

I don't keep a journal.

I don't keep a diary or a journal. Sometimes I'll send emails to friends, and that's a way of recording what I was thinking at any given time. But I've never been a journal keeper.

I remember keeping a lot of journals and diaries and trying to form a complete thought just based off of those immediate, raw feelings. If anything, I was conscious about how I just always wanted to be as honest as possible, no matter how vulnerable it would make me seem.

When I kept a diary, I realised that it was all moanings and depression, and I think that is quite common.

I've always written down how I feel.

I don't view my memory as accurate or static - and, in autobiographical fiction, my focus is still on creating an effect, not on documenting reality - so 'autobiographical,' to me, is closer in meaning to 'fiction' than 'autobiography.'

All my songs come from me because I only seem able to write about myself and my experiences.

Somebody said to me, 'You should keep a journal of this period in your life and really write down this stuff.' But that makes me a little uneasy.

We're all building our narratives in our heads.

We are all at the center of our own narrative, but it's a narrative that changes every time we retell it.

I'm sometimes mystified by people who keep diaries. I never thought of my existence as being that important.

I think it's too easy to recount your unhappy memories when you write about yourself. You bask in your own innocence. You revere your grief. You arrange your angers at their most becoming angles.

Now I have notebooks that are filled up, mostly with Doom Patrol, but also angry letters to myself mixed in with the comic.

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

I usually only draw myself in down periods... I suppose that's why I often draw myself looking grim. I just think, 'Let's have a look in the mirror.' When you are alone and you look in a mirror you never put on a pleasing smile. Well, you don't, do you?

Sometimes there’s no one to listen to what you really might like to say at a certain moment. The paper always listens.

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.

Keeping a diary supports personal development.