[Estimated reading time: 1 minute] People from all of walks of life keep diaries. Enjoy these 8 great quotes about diaries from a few famous ones:
Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. Oh well, it doesn’t matter. I feel like writing, and I have an even greater need to get all kinds of things off my chest.
—Anne Frank, the world’s most famous teen diarist
A diary means yes indeed.
—Gertrude Stein, American novelist, poet, playwright who hosted a salon in Paris for leading literary and art figures
I have tried to keep diaries before but they didn’t work out because of the necessity to be honest.
—John Steinbeck, American author who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962
What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.
—Simone de Beauvoir, French writer,intellectual, activist, who influenced feminist theory in the early 20th century
While we romanticize diaries as unmediated transcriptions of thought and feeling, [diaries] have really always been a forum for self-creation.
—Christine Nelson, curator of the 2011 exhibition “The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives” at the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
—Pablo Picasso, 20th-century Spanish artist
The diary taught me that it is in the moments of emotional crisis that human beings reveal themselves most accurately.
—Anaïs Nin, French-Cuban and American diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories
If you read someone else’s diary, you get what you deserve.
—David Sedaris, contemporary American humorist and writer
