Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.

People just want to know something, anything. It's all the stuff you never want to talk about, the private stuff.

Isn't it strange that we talk least about the things we think about most?

Any human being has private thoughts.

I think of the part of me that writes as the most private self. It's the part that's engaged the least with the rest of the world's needs.

If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.

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

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

when I first began this diary I said I would give a record of my inner life. I begin to wonder if I have said anything about my inner life. What if I have no inner life?

The very idea of printing my diary has always struck me as completely superficial.

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

It seems to me that the problem with diaries, and the reason that most of them are so boring, is that every day we vacillate between examining our hangnails and speculating on cosmic order.

Writing is the most solitary of arts.

Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.

When you write, you're always revealing a difficult part of yourself. It may not be a part of yourself that looks as difficult - there are parts that look more difficult - but in fact, they are all difficult, and you get kind of used to doing that. It is sort of the nature of the thing.

Recently I began reading my old diaries. Back to before the war. Gradually I became very depressed. The reason for that is probably that I wrote only when there were obstacles and halts to the flow of life, seldom when everything was smooth and even. ... As I read I distinctly felt what a half-truth a diary presents.

A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.

You need to give the reader a reason to turn the page. In a diary, you are just yourself. You aren't trying to entertain. You aren't trying to get anyone to turn the page. I have over one hundred and fifty six volumes of my diary and I guarantee you that if you read them, you'd stop and never come back.

Poems give you the lives of others and then circle in on your own inner world.

By digging into our souls, we often dig up what might better have remained there unnoticed." Alexis Alexandrovich

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.

Write what's up there." Sister Ignatius pointed at her temple. "As a great man once said, this is a secret garden. We've all got one of those." "Jesus?" "No, Bruce Springsteen.

There are things about which I don't even talk to myself.

Only in quietness do we possess our own minds and discover the resources of the Inner Life.

I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything.