“In order to retrieve your creativity, you need to find it. I ask you to do this by an apparently pointless process I call the morning pages. You will do the pages daily through all the weeks of the course and, I hope, much longer. I have been doing them for a decade now. I have students who have worked with them nearly that long and who would no more abandon them than breathing.… What are morning pages? Put simply, the morning pages are three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness.”

—Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

“Being a grownup means assuming responsibility for yourself, for your children, and—here’s the big curve—for your parents.”

—Wendy Wasserstein

“Madame Bovary, c’est moi.”

—Gustave Flaubert

“People write in diaries, but diaries never write back. It’s the same with these Morning Pages. Unrequited confessions.”

—Elise Hellman