Journal Writing Quotes

#1. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. #Quote by Grace Paley

#2. The best person to write for is yourself - and what better place to start than in a journal. #Quote by E.L. James

#3. Authentic writing cannot be coerced. #Quote by Ernst Junger

#4. There are certain things that make me relax, like writing my journal. That's the only time that I'm relaxing. It's the only time I really get to examine myself. #Quote by Jessica Simpson

#5. Possible Problems with Journal Writing
Be careful not to get too involved with your journal. In many published journals, writers such as Anais Nin worried that they found writing in a journal so satisfying that they were trapped into spending their lives writing about events, rather than living them. Don't let writing about feelings replace speaking with others. Journal writing should be a tool to help you become more confident, not a crutch that increases your isolation. If you find yourself becoming too dependent on your journal, take a break from writing for a week or two. #Quote by Heather Moehn

#6. I never pretend to be so superior a being as to be above having and indulging a hobby horse [her journal writing], and while I keep mine within due bounds and limits, nobody, I flatter myself, would wish to deprive me of the poor animal: to be sure, he is not formed for labour, and is rather lame and weak, but then the dear creature is faithful, constant, and loving, and though he sometimes prances, would not kick anyone into the mire, or hurt a single soul for the world
and I would not part with him for one who could win the greatest prize that ever was won at any races. #Quote by Fanny Burney

#7. I write journals and would recommend journal writing to anyone who wishes to pursue a writing career. You learn a lot. You also remember a lot ... and memory is important. #Quote by Judy Collins

#8. Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal. #Quote by William Zinsser

#9. I was an angst-y journal writing kid. #Quote by Justin Halpern

#10. Journal Writing

Keeping a journal is an extremely valuable practice. Right now, your mind may be racing with anxious thoughts and worries. Writing them down helps you sort through your problems and come to a deeper understanding of the issues in your life.
The benefits of journal writing may be more than just psychological. Dr. James Pennebaker, a researcher in Texas, discovered that when people write about difficult experiences for twenty minutes at a time over a period of three to four days, their immune system functioning increases. This indicates that the simple act of writing about emotions has a direct impact on your body's ability to withstand stress and fight infection and disease. #Quote by Heather Moehn

#11. Journaling Tips

-Try to write every day. Set aside a special time--perhaps right before you go to bed--to reflect on what happened during that day. Writing things down soon after they happen will help you to be honest and objective. If you wait, you may not remember the details as well, and maladaptive thinking patterns may cloud your interpretations.

-Record the date and time for every entry. Also, give each entry a title that reflects what you wrote about. This will help when you search for old entries about a particular day or topic.

-Don't worry about spelling, grammar, and punctuation, or organization. Being a perfectionist will lead to frustration. You aren't going to be graded on your journal--just write whatever comes to mind.

-Leave blank space for future comments. Reflecting on entries weeks, months, or even years after you wrote them will help you record your progress.

-Keep the journal in a safe place. Journal writing is most effective when you are completely honest. This may be hard if you are afraid your parents or siblings might read it. #Quote by Heather Moehn

#12. Keeping a journal: The short entries are often as dry as instant tea. Writing them down is like pouring hot water over them to release their aroma. #Quote by Ernst Junger

#13. The journal preserved her dignity; she might look and behave like and live the life of a trained nurse, but she was really an important writer in disguise. And at a time when she was cut off from everything she knew - family, home, friends - writing was the thread of continuity. It was what she had always done. #Quote by Ian McEwan

#14. Journal writing is, foremost, a way to order and reframe perspective. #Quote by Alexandra Johnson

#15. If you listen to your body and your intuition, they'll guide you well. There are countless ways to develop listening skills. Some helpful and classic practices include: dancing and drumming, sitting and walking meditations, t'ai chi or chi kung, painting or journal writing. It's important to find what works for you, and even the time of day or night that works best for you. Whatever you choose, the commonality is that they all offer an opportunity for quieting the mind, and slowing down enough to be
present and able to listen for inner guidance - and guidance from the plants themselves. #Quote by Robin Rose Bennett

#16. Write your dreams in journal,note book, card or on a cork. When you pen down your dreams, an a inner strength and divine power is activated for your to work towards the fulfillment of your dreams. #Quote by Lailah Gifty Akita

#17. Books are portals for the imagination, whether one is reading or writing, and unless one is keeping a private journal, writing something that no one is likely to read is like trying to have a conversation when you're all alone. Readers extend and enhance the writer's created work, and they deepen the colors of it with their own imagination and life experiences. In a sense, there's a revision every time one's words are read by someone else, just as surely as there is whenever the writer edits. Nothing is finished or completely dead until both sides quit and it's no longer a part of anyone's thoughts. So it seems almost natural that a lifelong avid reader occasionally wants to construct a mindscape from scratch after wandering happily in those constructed by others. If writing is a collaborative communication between author and reader, then surely there's a time and a place other than writing reviews for readers to 'speak' in the human literary conversation. #Quote by P.J. O'Brien

#18. A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed. Or so it is with me. Thus my writing life consists of spells of languor alternating with fits and spasms of mad typing. At all times, though, I keep a journal, a record book, and most everything begins in the form of notes scribbled down on the pages of that journal. #Quote by Edward Abbey

#19. Must look into the botanical background of substance known as hashish, I jotted in my journal, writing by the light of candles that grew incessantly jewel-like even as protean wafts of incense approached my snout like platters of ripe fruits borne on the back of Nubian pages. #Quote by Tom Robbins

#20. Millions of people are joined in the knowledge that writing brings insight and calm in the same way that prayer, meditation, or a long walk in the woods does. They have discovered that writing allows the racing mind to move at the pace of pen and paper or the pace of typing on the waiting screen - that journal writing is a spiritual practice. #Quote by Christina Baldwin

#21. What a comfort is this journal. I tell myself to myself and throw the burden on my book and feel relieved. #Quote by Anne Lister

#22. Until you begin to write, then you will see the beauty of writing. #Quote by Lailah Gifty Akita

#23. These empty pages are your future, soon to become your past. They will read the most personal tale you shall ever find in a book. #Quote by Anonymous

#24. And maybe these words have become something more than emails; maybe they are a kind of journal. Writing to you is like writing to another piece of myself. #Quote by Amy Reed

#25. Journal writing is a wonderful pathway to self-awareness. #Quote by Rand Olson

#26. They're just clothes,' she remembered writing down in the leafy, thin pages of her journal. 'And the warmth of them no longer comforts you nor belongs to you. They're just fabric without an owner. A familiarity that has faded and an attachment that no longer has a name, just a brand mark stitched into the seams.' She remembered her hand flowing quickly and purposefully across the page as her eyes shifted from the journal to the sweater to the journal again.
'And when I slip them over my head. I smell not your fragrance and feel no longer the emptiness you left behind. I see me in a mirror, with a sweater on. And I look as radiant and beautiful, and broken, and whole, and relentlessly happy as you left me. #Quote by Adriana Rodrigues

#27. Henry's recollections of the past, in contrast to Proust, are done while in movement. He may remember his first wife while making love to a whore, or he may remember his very first love while walking the streets, traveling to see a friend; and life does not stop while he remembers. Analysis in movement. No static vivisection. Henry's daily and continuous flow of life, his sexual activity, his talks with everyone, his cafe life, his conversations with people in the street, which I once considered an interruption to writing, I now believe to be a quality which distinguishes him from other writers. He never writes in cold blood: he is always writing in white heat.
It is what I do with the journal, carrying it everywhere, writing on cafe tables while waiting for a friend, on the train, on the bus, in waiting rooms at the station, while my hair is washed, at the Sorbonne when the lectures get tedious, on journeys, trips, almost while people are talking.
It is while cooking, gardening, walking, or love-making that I remember my childhood, and not while reading Freud's 'Preface to a Little Girl's Journal. #Quote by Anais Nin

#28. Only the broken heart has the ghost of a chance to grieve, to forgive, to long, to transform.
Christina Baldwin, author of Life's Companion, Journal Writing as a Spiritual Practice, 1990. Used with author's permission #Quote by Judith-Victoria Douglas

#29. And so, here is Rapa's book, my tribute to her, my one true friend, my love. #Quote by Poile Sengupta

#30. Often as writers, we are surprised by what we learn about ourselves. It runs counter to what we've thought about who we are. But it is closer to the truth. #Quote by Rob Bignell, Editor

#31. Allow your mood to be sweet and your day will be sweet too. #Quote by A.D. Posey

#32. I believe Jack Smith might have written THE BOOK on writing and revising for publication. Clean, direct, succinct
a book that is full of pure wisdom and truth, but also amazing technical advice. #Quote by Virgil Suarez

#33. My hand is very tired but I want to go on writing. I keep resting and thinking. All day I have been two people - the me imprisoned in yesterday and the me out here on the mound; and now there is a third me trying to get in - the me in what is going to happen next. #Quote by Dodie Smith

#34. To the question of writing at all we have sometimes been counselled to forget it, or rather the writing of books. What is required, we are told, is plays and films. Books are out of date! The book is dead, long live television! One question which is not even raised let alone considered is: Who will write the drama and film scripts when the generation that can read and write has been used up? #Quote by Chinua Achebe

#35. I've tried to explain to people that I don't 'love' writing any more than I 'love' breathing. It's something I do and it's something I need. If I thought about it as a love/hate thing, I probably would have quit long ago. And then died. #Quote by Allison M. Dickson

#36. If I write as well as I golf, I'm in trouble! #Quote by Buffy Andrews

#37. A careful and honest writer does not need to worry about style. As you become proficient in the use of language, your style will emerge, because you yourself will emerge, and when this happens you will find it increasingly easy to breakthrough the barriers that separate you from other minds, other hearts - which is, of course, the purpose of writing, as well as its principal reward. #Quote by Strunk Jr., William

#38. Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought? #Quote by Joan Didion

#39. The opposing missions of the various characters create the plot. #Quote by James N. Frey

#40. From a writing standpoint, maybe television is a little more satisfying because it's not all hinging on one thing. You can experiment, week to week, and you can be a little narrower in your scope one week, and then be a little broader the next week. But with film, everything can look the way you want it to look. You can really sculpt the final product. So from a directorial standpoint, film is more satisfying. But, they're both forms of media that I'd like to keep involvement in. #Quote by Seth MacFarlane

#41. There is a very big difference between writing for children and writing for young adults. The first thing I would say is that 'Young Adult' does not mean 'Older Children', it really does mean young but adult, and the category should be seen as a subset of adult literature, not of children's books. #Quote by Garth Nix

#42. The trick in writing children's books is to set up danger, mystery and excitement on page one. Force the kid to turn the page ... Then in the middle of each chapter there's a dramatic point of excitement, and at chapter's end, a cliffhanger. #Quote by Jerry West

#43. In any case, Cide Hamete Benengeli was a very careful historian, and very accurate in all things, as can be clearly seen in the details he relates to us, for although they are trivial and inconsequential, he does not attempt to pass over them in silence; his example could be followed by solemn historians who recount actions so briefly and succinctly that we can barely taste them, and leave behind in the inkwell, through carelessness, malice, or ignorance, the most substantive part of the work. #Quote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

#44. I became fascinated by the fact that you could translate written material into performance. #Quote by Raymond Cruz

#45. I try and journal every day, and that's where a lot of my lyric comes from. #Quote by Jessie Baylin

#46. Writing a book should be the best way to break into someone's house. #Quote by Krishnaraj HK

#47. Writing is an act of empathy. You are occupying and understanding a point of view that might be alien to your own
and work is often the keyhole through which you peer. #Quote by Benjamin Percy

#48. There's no idea in the world that is not contained by black life. I could write forever about the black experience in America. #Quote by August Wilson

#49. If I can write everything out plainly, perhaps I will myself understand better what has happened. #Quote by Sherwood Anderson

#50. In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes. #Quote by Dan Simmons

#51. Writing, is not a race. Is to distill the soul letter by letter in a slow and delicate process that will take years. #Quote by J.E. Negrete

#52. Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul. #Quote by Joseph Brodsky

#53. I really enjoy writing lyrics, I enjoy harmonies and I enjoy hearing the organic side of production because I have to do so much non- organic for a living for other artists, it's just a break for me, for my ears and it confuses people that think my music is supposed to sound like the stuff I do for my day job, but that's just people that don't know me. #Quote by Butch Walker

#54. My son had toyed with the idea of writing and trying to write a little bit, so that kind of gave me the bug to write also. #Quote by George Strait

#55. Writing writhed across the surface of the stone, runes that looked a little familiar. Norse, maybe? Some of them looked more like Egyptian. They seemed to take something from several different sources, leaving them unreadable. #Quote by Jim Butcher

#56. Songwriting is like editing. You write down all this stuff - all this bad, stupid stuff - and then you have to get rid of everything except the very best. #Quote by Juliana Hatfield

#57. When the work is the best work, it's more like being a secretary than it is a creative person, you just sort of take the stuff down. #Quote by Stephen King

#58. What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry - but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own skeptical mind, is doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, as long as he wrote Good poetry. #Quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton

#59. Originality is little more
than the fine blending of influences. #Quote by Teju Cole

#60. I remember people would talk about Country Music like it was this sexist, lame thing. Well, no, because Dolly Parton is writing songs and playing her guitar and producing. She's doing it all and she's got hits on the radio. #Quote by Neko Case

#61. Emphasizing and rewarding length over quality results in worse writing and more reader abandonment. #Quote by Marco Arment

#62. It seems to me that the novel is very much alive as a form. Without any question, every epoch has its own forms, and the novel nowadays cannot resemble that of the nineteenth century. In this domain all experiments are justified, and it is better to write something new clumsily than to repeat the old brilliantly. In the nineteenth century, novels dealt with the fate of a person or of a family; this was linked to life in that period. In our time the destinies of people are interwoven. Whether man recognizes it or not, his fate is much more linked to that of many other people than it used to be. #Quote by Ilya Ehrenburg

#63. My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel
it is, before all, to make you see. #Quote by Joseph Conrad

#64. Read as widely and as deeply as you can. You have to be a reader before you can be a writer. #Quote by Y.S. Lee

#65. Writing, for me, is a search for God. #Quote by Carson McCullers

#66. I'm looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I play everybody. #Quote by David Bowie

#67. There even are places where English completely disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years! Why can't the English teach their children how to speak? #Quote by Alan Jay Lerner

#68. It's not words, but years we should be editing. Remember: time spent on bad art is a form of redundancy, doing the same thing twice is a form of tautology, and wasting precious moments complaining about life is a form of pleonasm. We should all learn to live our lives concisely. #Quote by Anthony Marais

#69. I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure. #Quote by George Orwell

#70. Don't people know that it's the hardest work in the world? Joseph Conrad said that he had loaded hundredweights of coal all day long on a ship in Amsterdam in the wintertime, and that is was nothing to the energy demanded for a day's work writing. #Quote by Mary Lee Settle

#71. Whether I'm writing solo stuff, electronic stuff, or material for Motley, I just write to write. I come up with it and put things in different piles. #Quote by Tommy Lee

#72. I think in some ways, acting and writing are the same. You're getting inside the skin of someone else; you're creating their language and their actions. As a writer, you have to see the whole picture and the structure, and you have to understand every character. #Quote by Finn Wittrock

#73. I don't talk about Amy Winehouse as a 'singer.' She's a pioneer. I listened to her endlessly when I started writing. #Quote by Laura Mvula

#74. I wanted to be a composer for a while, and for a while, and maybe still, I found writing music much easier than writing poetry. So maybe my brain clings to it. #Quote by Shane McCrae

#75. It's in my blood, as magic is in yours." His mouth is still smiling, but his tone is somber. "I couldn't stop writing even if I wanted to. #Quote by Elora Bishop

#76. Writing often in the pages of the New York Times, Allison Arieff is a powerful spokesperson. "Bring back the sidewalk!" she urged in one of her articles, explaining: "Community is born from social routine - running into neighbors at the mailbox or while walking down the street. Design for these serendipitous encounters."8 #Quote by Bella DePaulo