The writer and psychoanalyst Marion Milner, on the value of writing and journaling:

I had often thought that novelists and poets had a special advantage in learning how to live, their writings providing them with an instrument that most of us were denied. By being able to dramatize their own difficulties they were in a far better position for solving them. But if one had no gift for creating imaginative truth, for symbolizing the stresses and strains of one's own inner life in terms of sound and shape or invented happenings to others, was there no way of dealing with them?

Of course there were books on psychology, handbooks telling one how to be happy, successful, well-balanced, thousands of words of exhortation about how one ought to live. But…they seemed too remote, they spoke in general terms and it was so hard to see how they applied…it was so fatally easy to evade their demands on oneself.

Was there not a way by which each person could find out for himself what he was like, not by reading what other people thought he ought to be, but directly, as directly as knowing the sky is blue and how an apple tastes, not needing anyone to tell him? Perhaps, then, if one could not write for other people one could write for oneself.

From A Life of One’s Own, which was originally published under her pseudonym Joanna Field