Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing.

Great minds talk about ideas; small minds talk about people

If you are not moving closer to what you want, you probably aren't doing enough asking. And you're probably not asking the single most important question that can help you achieve a higher level of success and personal fulfillment: How am I doing?

The writers who get my personal award are the ones who show exceptional promise of looking at their lives in this world as candidly and searchingly and feelingly as they know how and then of telling the rest of us what they have found there most worth finding. We need the eyes of writers like that to see through. We need the blood of writers like that in our veins.

We are all such escape artists, you and I. We don't like to get too serious about things, especially about ourselves. When we are with other people, we are apt to talk about almost anything under the sun except for what really matters to us, except for our own lives, except for what is going on inside our own skins. We pass the time of day. We chatter. We hold each other at bay, keep our distance from each other even when God knows it is precisely each other that we desperately need.

Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.

I don't know if speaking to a therapist is right for everyone.

She'd love to go over him with a fine-toothed comb. Rummage around in him. Turn him upside down. Empty him out.

I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing. Treacherous ground, my own territory.

The only sensible person is my tailor. He measures me anew each time he sees me.

The unconscious is the unwritten history of mankind from time unrecorded.

It's an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary; not only because I have never done so before, but because it seems to me that neither I - nor for that matter anyone else - will be interested in the unbosomings of a thirteen-year-old school girl.