Courtney Barnett Quotes

I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. And there's some nice imagery in there. I don't think of what to do with it.

Whenever something happens that makes me laugh or if I remember something in the middle of the night that I want to share, I jot the experience down.

I often spend the majority of my time thinking and writing down notes.

What I think is important about essayists, about the essay as opposed to a lot of personal writing is that the material has to be presented in a processed way. I'm just not interested in writing, "Hey, this is what happened to me today." You get to a place that has very little to do with your personal experience and talks about some larger idea or something in the culture. I don't think you can get to that unless you have had a lot of time to gestate and maybe if I was taking a lot of notes while stuff was going on, I wouldn't be able to get to that place as easily.

You're always thinking, "What does that add up to?" You can't really get a handle on it. I was curious. I felt like it would be an interesting challenge for me to write down what I'd seen and done and learned - all the convolutions captured in one item that I could look at and get some grip on what the hell happened.

Note-taking is important to me: a week's worth of reading notes (or "thoughts I had in the shower" notes) is cumulatively more interesting than anything I might be able to come up with on a single given day.

Keeping a journal has taught me that there is not so much new in your life as you sometimes think. When you re-read your journal you find out that your latest discovery is something you already found out five years ago. Still, it is true that one penetrates deeper and deeper into the same ideas and the same experiences.

May I suggest that you write, that you keep journals, that you express your thoughts on paper. Writing is a great discipline. It is a tremendous educational effort. It will assist you in various ways, and you will bless the lives of many-your families and others-now and in the years to come, as you put on paper some of your experiences and some of your musings.

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 feel like part of that is because I'm always on deadline. I've been a freelancer my entire career and, at any given time, I have several deadlines for all sorts of things whether it's some magazine piece or ad copywriting or anything. Obviously, people with deadlines keep journals all the time but, for me, the idea of doing more writing is never appealing. It's why I never blog.

Sometimes, the experiences that tell you what you don't want to do are as important as those that tell you what you do want to do.

I think it's important for people like me to evaluate and reevaluate.

I've lived almost, like, four completely different lives. (Stripping) was just one section - one little small section, if that - but it was a very interesting and turbulent but kind of wild ride and I'm not ashamed of it all. I think it's hilarious and I learned a lot about human nature.

Everyone tells me I've had such an interesting life, but sometimes I think it's been nothing but stomach disturbances and self-concern.

But I live an interesting life and I can tell a pretty good story and it has helped my career. But the downside is people know everything.

I think it's always important to reflect anyway, no matter what age you're approaching or what milestone is in front of you. Reflection should be almost a daily thing if possible.

I urge you to read Eternal Treblinka and think deeply about its important message.

I think that probably the most important thing about our education was that it taught us to question even those things we thought we knew.

I walk around and think about things. When I come across a thought that makes me laugh, I write it down. Then, at night, I say the thought to people through a microphone. I don't think about politics or pop culture very much, so those thoughts don't often make it to the microphone.

Nobody's life is interesting enough to warrant a third memoir.

A lot of filmmakers and actors say, "It's so important to bring an authenticity to the role," blah, blah, blah. But then it's interesting because you're also trying to be somebody else, and viewers are going to associate you with that, so I don't think it really has an answer.

I don't know what I think until I write it down.

Your own private journal should record the way you face up to challenges that beset you. Do not suppose life changes so much that your experiences will not be interesting to your posterity. Experiences of work, relations with people, and an awareness of the rightness and wrongness of actions will always be relevant.

I also think within the scene, a specific scene - if I were to play a part that I played 10 years ago now, my interpretation of that scene would be totally different. I would be making different choices. Because I can't somehow subtract all of the experiences that I've had in my life. And it's fascinating to see, because somewhere I'm very reflective in that. You know, I've been playing basically actually close to 40 years old, so I'm somewhere lost in age in this movie. But it's been fascinating to see that I can't subtract that time.

Sometimes we have thoughts that even we don't understand. Thoughts that aren't even true—that aren't really how we feel—but they're running through our heads anyway because they're interesting to think about.

The most important things that one's working on are not necessarily the most important things that one thinks one's working on.