Education Quote by Judy Collins

Judy Collins smuggles a craft lesson into what sounds like friendly, almost homespun advice: keep a journal, because memory is the raw material. Coming from a musician whose career rides on storytelling as much as sound, the line reframes “writing” as less about inspiration and more about training your attention. “You learn a lot” isn’t about accumulating facts; it’s about noticing patterns in yourself and other people, the way a performer learns an audience by watching what lands and what doesn’t. The journal becomes rehearsal space.

The quiet pivot is her insistence that “you also remember a lot.” It’s a gentle rebuke to the romantic myth that artists simply “feel” their way to truth. Collins implies that feeling is unreliable without a record. Memory here isn’t just nostalgia; it’s a working archive. For a songwriter, the difference between a vague ache and a lyric that hits is often the specificity that only returns when you’ve written it down: the overheard phrase, the exact texture of a regret, the odd detail that makes a scene believable.

There’s subtext, too, about survival. Collins came up in an era when women artists were often packaged, edited, and spoken for. Journaling is a private counter-narrative, a way to keep your own version of events intact. That closing phrase - “and memory is important” - lands like a moral, but it’s also a warning: if you don’t preserve your experience, someone else will rewrite it for you, and your art will thin out into generic sentiment.