I believe that during the past year I can trace some increase of ease in my professional writing which I attribute to my casual half hours after tea

Nor can one let the pen write without guidance; for fear of becoming slack and untidy. . . .

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.

as Virginia Woolf herself remarks somewhere in these diaries, one gets into the habit of recording one particular kind of mood — irritation or misery, say — and of not writing one’s diary when one is feeling the opposite. The portrait is therefore from the start unbalanced, and, if someone then deliberately removes another characteristic, it may... See more