Private Writing Quotes

You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.

Everyone should keep someone else's diary.

Fundamentally, diaries are about loneliness.

When I'm working on something, I proceed as if no one else will ever read it.

But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles.

I don't journal to 'be productive.' I don't do it to find great ideas or to put down prose I can later publish. The pages aren't intended for anyone but me. It's the most cost-effective therapy I've ever found.

Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

It didn't occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That's how one has to write anyway--in secret.

When it comes to the personal essays I write, I just convince myself that no one will ever read them.

The book, you understand, was not written for publication. It was the portrayal of my emotions, the analysis of my own soul life during three months of my nineteenth year. I wrote then all the time, just as I do now, but, though the book is in diary form, it is not a diary.

I kept a diary as a teenager but I never would have shared it with anyone. Still, I think it's very good practice to write things down.

When I was very young, I used to share much of what I wrote with my family, but as I got older and more self-conscious, it became a much more private process.

No one will ever know from what secret I am writing and the fact that I say so changes nothing.

If you're writing, you're starting in private. It can really be this amazing, private, freeing experience. Forget that it's for other people - that comes in later.

I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private.

I'm glad that I didn't have the Internet when I started writing. I started writing when I was 20 and didn't show a word of it to anyone until I was 28. I had the sense to keep it to myself. Now the temptation with blogs and such, they're just getting it out there; maybe it would have been best to keep it to themselves.

After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.

I started writing songs by myself. That always came from whatever I was feeling and being honest about that because I never had any intention of anyone ever hearing them.

Writing is something I've always done on the side. I thought that no one would be interested, so I kept it to myself.

Go on thinking that you don't need to be read and you'll find that it may become quite true: no one will feel the need tom read it because it is written for yourself alone; and the public won't feel any impulse to gate crash such a private party.

I came from anonymity, and I will continue to write as a private pursuit.

I don't think that I ever believed that poetry would be a career. I have always thought of poems as something more private than professional... I would never introduce myself as a poet. I will always have some other thing that I am.

A man is crazy who writes a secret in any other way than one which will conceal it from the vulgar.

I am a buyer of blank books. Kids find it interesting that I would buy a blank book. They say, Twenty-Six dollars for a blank book! Why would you pay that? The reason I pay twenty-six dollars is to challenge myself to find something worth twenty-six dollars to put in there. All my journals are private, but if you ever got hold of one of them, you wouldn't have to look very far to discover it is worth more than twenty-six dollars

I write pretty much every day, but I don't have any desire to publish anything.