On Writing

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

How it felt to me : that is getting closer to the truth about a note book.

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

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly com pulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only acciden tally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself

A journal is an artificially permanent record of thought and inner life, which are invariably transient — something the most prolific diarist in modern literary history articulated herself in her elegant defense of the fluid self. We are creatures of remarkable moodiness and mental turbulence, and what we think we believe at any given moment —... See more

eepers of private notebooks are a differ ent breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

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

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.

So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking.