Personal Writing Quotes:

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing.

- E. L. Doctorow

source: "The Myth Maker". Interview with Bruce Weber, www.nytimes.com. October 20, 1985.

topic: Writing, Exploration, Personal Writing

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

- E. L. Doctorow

source: Interview in "Writers at Work" (The Paris Review Interviews), 8th Series, 1988.

topic: Writing, Schizophrenia, Form, Writing Advice, Inspiring Writing

We are living in a renaissance of personal writing. People are rebalancing the impersonalization endemic to modern society with an increase in personal introspection. We have enough common psychology under our belts to know that psychology doesn't explain or heal everything and that it isn't the fulfillment of awareness, but its beginning. We are undergoing a shift in paradigms in which we are trying to develop new models for humanness and human responsibility. This is no small task. Our individual lives are placed under increasing pressure to respond adequately to both inner and outer change.

- Christina Baldwin

topic: Responsibility, Writing, People, Individual Life, Journaling

There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman. As hard as we have worked and as far as we have come, there are still so many forces conspiring to tell women that our concerns are petty, our opinions aren’t needed, that we lack the gravitas necessary for our stories to matter. That personal writing by women is no more than an exercise in vanity and that we should appreciate this new world for women, sit down, and shut up.

- Lena Dunham

source: Lena Dunham (2014). “Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"”, p.16, Random House

topic: Writing, Exercise, Vanity, Kind Of Girl, Gravitas

Pivotal to a happy writing life is a practice of daily personal writing.

- Julia Cameron

topic: Writing, Practice, Life Is, Personal Writing

Making promises to myself, in my personal writing practice, has been important to me all my life. In practical application it is so much easier for me to make promises to others, and keep them, than it is to make promises to myself. "Why is that?" and the answer I gave myself is that in making promises to others I create a model of accountability and reinforcement. I duplicate that in my writing and have grown increasingly better at making and keeping promises to myself.

- Mary Anne Radmacher

topic: Writing, Practice, Keeping Promises, Personal Writing

I prefer to not be feeling like I'm having to be fake about things that are the most dear to me in terms of writing, which is something related to my own, personal writing. I mean, I've done tons and tons of fake writing.

- Mandy Stadtmiller

topic: Writing, Mean, Fake, Personal Writing