"I write journals and would recommend journal writing to anyone who wishes to pursue a writing career. You learn a lot. You also remember a lot... and memory is important"
About this Quote
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.
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.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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