Walter Scott Quotes

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it, dull to the contemporary who reads it, invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it!

I've been keeping diaries for 27 years.

If there was a day that history was not recorded, then the history of one hundred days would be in peril.

Every play is so important. It's a record of what life was like at the time you wrote that play or that book.

The whole point of diaries is that other people find them and read what you've put. I did once take to writing my inner thoughts on the computer at the end of other things I was writing and ended up faxing four pages of hideous stuff to my accountant so I don't do that now.

I've thrown away lots of my old diaries - you never know who might get their hands on them. But I have kept a few notes on the good old days.

The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there primarily to tell one particular story, whereas an autobiography tries to be a full account of a life.

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.

An obituary should be an exercise in contemporary history, not a funeral oration.

I have thousands of tapes, and photos and fliers, letters, posters, artwork - basically everything that ever happened, I kept. I'm not a hoarder, though. I'm sort of a librarian.

I think it's important to have some documentation of the past.

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'll never put my memoirs in print.

I write in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done.

A diary is a way of hedging one’s bets against death.

Biography is the best history.

History is the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another.

My albums really are like scrapbooks to me.

I've always been steady on and off keeping diaries and journals. I try to document everything so I can remember it the older I get.

Things we write down are the fragments shored against our ruins. They outlast us, these scraps of words on paper. Like the detritus from the tsunami washing up on the other side of the ocean, writing is what can be salvaged.

Sound preservation is not only the history of our culture and our country but also a document of life in the world. There is something with sound that is so extraordinary that it can be preserved, that we can listen to a recording made in 1925 and be transported back to that time.

Melted down, silver is worth a little more than four dollars an ounce. But carved, inlaid, and engraved, and identified with a particular year, it becomes the direct reflection, often the literal record, of human history, our movement through time.

I always felt, like, I'll leave autobiographies to the people who are kind of iconic.

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

Historia (Inquiry); so that the actions of of people will not fade with time.