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At the best and even unexpurgated, diaries give a distorted or one-sided portrait of the writer.
Sep 10, 2025
Everyone should keep someone else's diary.
I used LiveJournal frequently, almost daily, since ~age 13 until ~18. I kept a personal diary there. I also participated in various "LiveJournal communities". At the risk of sounding patronizing or something, I see LiveJournal and now Tumblr as wonderful because they give young girls ways to interact with eachother and learn and talk about new interests, ideas etc as well as support eachother emotionally.
When our executive producer, Julie Plec, told me I was going to become a hybrid I got really excited. Because theres a lot of responsibility that comes with that, especially in our world of The Vampire Diaries where Tyler is the first successful hybrid thats made.
The show [ Vampire Diaries] knows how to keep people on the edge of their seat, that's for sure.
The short version is that I started an internet diary a long, long time ago (six years!) because I was bored with my job. I figured I would write a few funny things a few times a week until I had enough material to do stand-up. After two or three weeks, I emailed it to some friends. They emailed it to other friends, and more people started reading. Eventually, I realized that stand-up was scary and it would be much easier to just keep writing this stuff at work.
Plants and flowers of the commonest kind can form a pleasing diary, because nothing which calls back to us the remembrance of a happy moment can be insignificant.
Never write up your diary on the day itself, for it takes longer than that to know what happened.
... our objects, bibelots, whatnots, and knickknacks-say the most about who we are. They are as honest as a diary.
I won't give up the diary again. I must hold on here, it is the only place I can.
Journalism only tells us what men are doing; it is fiction that tells us what they are thinking, and still more what they are feeling. If a new scientific theory finds the soul of a man in his dreams, at least it ought not to leave out his day-dreams. And all fiction is only a diary of day-dreams instead of days. And this profound preoccupation of men's minds with certain things always eventually has an effect even on the external expression of the age.
You don't lose your swing between the ninth green and the tenth tee, and you don't lose your swing from one day to the next. If you think you do, something is going on that you don't understand. A diary might help explain it to you.
I was in such a creative groove after turning in my last book (The Andy Cohen Diaries: A Deep Look at a Shallow Year) that I decided to keep writing in the hope that I'd one day do a sequel.
Certainly when you read someone's diary [ superficial] that's a word that jumps to mind.
My lyrics are my diary - you're hearing every detail of my life.
Darling, if I think of all I miss now, I will go crazy. I should not think of that. I only want to think of all that I still have, and then I am rich. Your spirit is always around me, in your diary, our letters, all the things you got for our household. How proud we were of that! And the nearly six years! O God, I thank you for those years. If I never had met you, I would now not have all the sorrow; but I would have missed these riches -- and do these years not abundantly balance the lonely years I face without you?
Yes, there is no doubt that paper is patient and as I don't intend to show this cardboard-covered notebook, bearing the proud name of "diary," to anyone, unless I find a real friend, boy or girl, probably nobody cares. And now I come to the root of the matter, the reason for my starting a diary: it is that I have no such real friend.
I read Aschenbach's constant desire to go beyond the works he has already produced to be the counterpart of Mann's deep wish to surpass his previous fiction; sometimes the diaries express this in terms of a dejected judgment that the summit has already been reached.
Do you really keep a diary? I'd give anything to look at it. May I? Oh, no. You see, it is simply a very young girl's record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy.
My confessions are shameless. I confess, but do not repent. The fact is, my confessions are prompted, not by ethical motives, butintellectual. The confessions are to me the interesting records of a self-investigator.
Even if you look at the 'Paranormal Activity' movies, at the end of the movie things get really crazy and nutty, but they all start in a very mundane situation that people can relate to, and that's also to some degree what we tried to do in 'Chernobyl Diaries.
I kind of got my big break with 'The Princess Diaries' and during the press rounds for that everyone asked me: 'Did you always want to be a princess growing up?' And the truth was, no I wanted to be Catwoman.
When I got my start, I kind of got my big break with The Princess Diaries and during the press rounds for that everyone asked me: "Did you always want to be a princess growing up?" And the truth was, no I wanted to be Catwoman. And I think a lot of women feel that way. And the fact that I am actually her is such a dream come true. It's such a pinch me moment. And the fact that I am Catwoman in Chris Nolan's Gotham to Christian Bale's Batman is unbelievably cool.
I'm the one not caring. I'm the one pretending the Earth isn't shattering all around me because I don't want it to be. I don't want to know there was an earthquake in Missouri. I don't want to know the Midwest can die, also, that what's going on isn't just tides and tsunamis. I don't want to have any more to be afraid of. I didn't start this diary for it to be a record of death.
In the early 90s, I wrote a play called Word of Mouth in which I played a number of different characters. One was a thirteen-year-old boy who, through a series of diary entries, realizes that hes gay.
If people recognize me from The Vampire Diaries, they just give me that look that's like, "I think I know you. I think I saw you boxing in 1912, but I'm not sure," because it was such a short-lived run.
Philosophers are divided on the question of whether the narrative therein unfolded [the Crossman Diaries] is grippingly boring or boringly gripping.
Sleephackers go to bed with sensors on their wrists and foreheads and maintain detailed electronic sleep diaries, which they often share online. To shift between sleep phases, sleephackers experiment with various diets, room and body temperatures, and kinds of pre-sleep physical exercise.
When you're travelling, your day is jam-packed. I just don't have time to whip out a PC all the time. But I can whip out a BlackBerry and tweet. I keep a constant diary of where I'm at and why I'm there.
What's that supposed to be anyway?" said Fred squinting at Dobby's painting. "Looks like a Gibbon with two black eyes!" "It's Harry," said George pointing at the back of the picture. "Says so on the back." "Good likeness," said Fred grinning. Harry threw his new homework diary at him.
When I think about the things that cause me pain or the things that cause me trouble or frustration, it's not people asking for my autograph; it's people breaking my heart. That happens to you whether you've sold millions of records or whether you're taking classes at college. You're going to believe people when they say that they love you. I don't leave out details when I write songs about that. I try to make my songs as personal as possible because, ultimately, my music started out as just trying to turn my diary entries into something that was a piece of music. And that has never changed.
Klaus Mann saw very clearly how different was his own (more liberated) form of homosexuality from the same-sex attractions of his father - and that is reiterated in TM's diary queries about "how two men can sleep together".
Think about Mann's own daily routine (ascribed to Aschenbach), read the extant diaries and the letters in which he discusses the novella's themes, and it won't be so obvious that the attraction to Tadzio is completely unprecedented; it also won't be obvious that what Aschenbach wants is full sexual contact.
Every medium by which people communicate can be subject to exploitation by those with illegal intentions. Nevertheless, this is no reason to hand Big Brother the keys to unlock our e-mail diaries, open our ATM records, read our medical records, or translate our international communications.
History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions.
Experience is the only real teacher and if you keep a diary you get three bites at educating yourself - when it happens, when you write it down, and when you reread it and realise you were wrong. Making mistakes is part of life. The only things I would feel ashamed of would be if I had said things I hadn't believed in order to get on. Some politicians do do that.
I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.
A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.
To keep a diary is to attempt a difficult literary form. Its effectiveness is likely to derive from a special blend of honesty and appetite for life that gives the power to record everyday happenings while magically freeing them from banality and triviality.
I have a picture of the Pont Neuf on a wall in my apartment, but i know that Paris is really on the closet shelf, in the box next to the sleeping bag, with the rest of my diaries.
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
I guess whatever maturity is there may be there because I've been keeping a journal forever. In high school my friends would make fun of me - you're doing your man diary again. So I was always trying to translate experience into words.
And the reason I am so nervous is that everything I do now is leading me to one of three possible futures... Which one will it be? Time alone will tell. But still I know that writing this diary can perhaps provide the answer; it may even help produce the right future.
I remember," she said. "Lawrence Malley. He was an expert in security systems." "Aka Lightfinger Larry." Dan grinned. "He was also wanted in five states." "Great," Amy groaned. "I sent you to a tutorial with a crook." "It got us in here, didn't it?" "I guess I'm grateful to him, then," Amy said doubtfully. "Don't be," Dan said. "The first lock I opened was on your diary. Don't worry, I read two pages and fell asleep.
I went to NYU graduate film school and met Pam [Romanowsky], and after doing a few things with her I thought she had the right sensibility and that she could figure it [The Adderall Diaries] out.
I loved the book [The Adderall Diaries] I optioned it, I think some years ago. But there's a lot of different threads in the book. It starts off as one thing, where he's trying to cover this murder trial, and then his own life starts to impinge on that, so it becomes something else. I found that fascinating.
When I read the book [The Adderall Diaries] I loved it, and I maybe had an inkling that there was a lot of good material in there. I didn't quite know at the time how to adapt it into a film, but I hoped I would figure it out one day.
The Adderall Diaries is phenomenal. With jittery finesse and a reformed tweaker's eye for detail, Stephen Elliott captures the terrifying, hilarious, heart-strangling reality of a life whose scorched-earth physical and psycho-emotional dimensions no one could have invented - they absolutely had to be lived. By all rights, the author should either be dead or chewing his fingers in a bus station. Instead, he may well have written the memoir of an entire generation.
The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.
I'm always looking for context in which people tell stories. In "Fight Club" it's these support groups for dying people, and then in "Choke" it's 12-step recovery groups. In one novel it's artists' colonies, in another novel it's a diary form that submariners' wives typically keep so that when their husband comes back from serving on a submarine they have an accounting of their spouse's time. So I'm always looking for, number one, a non-fiction context - because you can tell a more outrageous story if you use a non-fiction form.