First, as Saroyan mentions, a journal helps jog our memories of past events, the places and people we have known. Second, a journal encourages regular appointments with the desk and provides an orderly place to store the chaotic pieces of our lives. Third, journal keeping prompts us to notice the extraordinary detail in even the most ordinary day.

The notebook is akin to the author’s other brain, the brain that has the freedom to think and muse freely with total recall.

Journal writing is like singing in the shower—I can let ’er rip without fear of judgment.

The idea is to record your first impressions of a place as quickly as possible, avoiding the filter of self-consciousness.

As artists have sketchbooks, writers have notebooks. Whether they choose to call them notebooks, journals, or daybooks, their motives are the same—to capture and document thoughts, sentiments, observations, ideas, ruminations, and reflections before these vanish.

A personal journal can be many things. It can be a record of life events, a sounding board, or a tool for personal growth.

Truth is what literature is about: the conviction that through words, not just any words but the right words, and whatever else accompanies them, I might reach the essence of things.

Lu Chi’s Wen Fu: The Art of Writing.

They’re photographs of my mind and they help me make a kind of sense of my development as a person as well as of my development as a writer.