On Writing

he reader completes thecircuit, because he influences the author both before and after the act ofcomposition. Authors are readers themselves. By reading and associating withother readers and writers, they form notions of genre and style and a generalsense of the literary enterprise, which affects their texts, whether they arecomposing Shakespearean... See more

It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about.

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

smart women almost always wear black in Cuba,” a fashion hint without much potential for practical application. And does not the relevance of these notes seem marginal at best?

At no point have I ever been able suc cessfully to keep a diary

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

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.

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