That's what I must avoid: I mustn't put strangeness where there's nothing. I think that is the danger of keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything, you are on the look-out, and you continually stretch the truth.

El peligro de llevar un diario es que se exagera todo, uno esta al acecho, forzando continuamente la verdad

What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.

The papers exaggerate. They exaggerate everything, just to sell papers. The government exaggerates, to keep our minds off what morons they are.

You exaggerate everything. You continually force the truth because you're always looking for something.

I trust you realize what an exaggerator I am, —that I lay myself out to exaggerate whenever I have an opportunity, —pile Pelion upon Ossa, to reach heaven so. Expect no trivial truth from me, unless I am on the witness-stand.

All imitation is exaggeration.

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.

"The other night we talked about literature's elimination of the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated "dose" of life. I said, almost indignantly, "That's the danger of it, it prepares you to live, but at the same time, it exposes you to disappointments because it gives a heightened concept of living, it leaves out the dull or stagnant moments. You, in your books, also have a heightened rhythm, and a sequence of events so packed with excitement that I expected all your life to be delirious, intoxicated."
Literature is an exaggeration, a dramatization, and those who are nourished on it (as I was) are in great danger of trying to approximate an impossible rhythm. Trying to live up to Dostoevskian scenes every day. And between writers there is a straining after extravagance. We incite each other to jazz-up our rhythm."

Things written down can cause a great deal of harm. All too often, people don't consider that.

...to underestimate one’s self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one’s own powers.

I shall commence, I think, with a slight exaggeration and go on from there into an outright lie.

[E]xaggeration establishes no good understanding between the reader and the author. It is a solemn appeal to our credulity, and we are right to resent it. It is the violence of a weakling hand—the worst manner of violence.

For someone like me, it is a very strange habit to write in a diary. Not only that I have never written before, but it strikes me that later neither I, nor anyone else, will care for the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.