Mae West really did speak a version of this line — “I always say, keep a diary and someday it’ll keep you” — as Peaches O’Day in Every Day’s a Holiday (1937), a screenplay she wrote herself. But the joke was already fifteen years old: Quote Investigator ↗ finds it in print on 25 May 1922, credited to Margot Asquith, and concludes that “based on current evidence she should receive the credit.”
“Keep a Diary, and Perhaps Someday It Will Keep You” Margot Asquith — "Keep a diary, my dear, and later on, perhaps, the diary will keep you." Schenectady Gazette, 25 May 1922, p. 6. Mae West's screen version, "I always say, keep a diary and someday it'll keep you," came fifteen years later in her 1937 screenplay Every Day's a Holiday. Via quotle.info
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Mae West. Use the credit shown above instead.
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In context
Evoking the world of Margot Asquith — British socialite, diarist and memoirist. Theme: "Keep a Diary, and Perhaps Someday It Will Keep You". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Keep a Diary, and Perhaps Someday It Will Keep You". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
The earliest documented telling
Earliest documented in
Schenectady Gazette
Date & page
25 May 1922 · page 6, column 8, under the heading “Turn About”
Speaker
Margot Asquith, at a dinner party, on the success of her memoirs
Mae West’s version
Every Day’s a Holiday
“Ah, my diaries!” And Mrs. Asquith smiled across the table at a pretty Philadelphia girl. “Keep a diary, my dear,” she said, “and later on, perhaps, the diary will keep you.”
Newspaper filler item, 1922
Transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗ from the Schenectady Gazette of 25 May 1922. Two honest caveats: this is a press anecdote reporting a spoken remark, not something Asquith is known to have written down herself; and Mae West’s 1937 screen wording is different — “I always say, keep a diary and someday it’ll keep you.”
1605 — the proverb the joke parodies is already old: “Keep your shop and your shop will keep you,” recorded by The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs in Eastward Ho as “Touchstone, keepe thy shopp, and thy shoppe will keepe thee,” per Quote Investigator ↗.
25 May 1922 — a filler item in the Schenectady Gazette (page 6) has Margot Asquith, complimented on her diary-based memoirs, tell a young Philadelphia guest: “Keep a diary, my dear, and later on, perhaps, the diary will keep you.” This is the first instance in QI’s chronology ↗.
24 September 1925 — the Boston Globe (page A23) prints the same anecdote as “Keep a Diary,” but with Lillie Langtry as the speaker, crediting the Minneapolis Tribune. QI ↗ suspects reassignment rather than a second coinage.
1937 — Mae West, who wrote the screenplay for Every Day’s a Holiday ↗ and played Peaches O’Day in it, delivers the line as “I always say, keep a diary and someday it’ll keep you” — the wording that stuck.
✓Public domain
The text shown here — the Schenectady Gazette filler item of 25 May 1922 — was published in the United States well before 1931 and is in the public domain, as is Margot Asquith’s Autobiography of 1920–1922. Mae West’s 1937 screen wording is a separate matter: Every Day’s a Holiday is a 1937 Paramount picture from her own screenplay and is not public domain, so the nine-word version is quoted here only as short fair-use citation.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
How it ended up as a Mae West line
This is not a fabricated quote — Mae West wrote it and said it. It is a borrowed one, and the borrowing has been quietly dropped every time the line is reprinted since.
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The popular creditMae West Popularised, not coined
Quote aggregators print the line under her name and cite the film as its source — AZQuotes, for example ↗, gives “I always say, keep a diary and someday it’ll keep you” with Every Day’s a Holiday (1937) attached. That citation is accurate as far as it goes; it just stops fifteen years too late. Quote Investigator ↗ notes the remark “was in circulation fifteen years before the movie was released.”
✕
A rival claimLillie Langtry Reassigned, 1925
On 24 September 1925 the Boston Globe ran the anecdote under the heading “Keep a Diary” with Langtry as the speaker at an Anglo-American dinner in London, crediting the Minneapolis Tribune. QI ↗ allows that she may have told the joke, but says the 1922 citation “suggests that the remark may have simply been reassigned to her.”
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The wording“Keep a diary, and perhaps someday it will keep you” Composite phrasing
The tidy modern form matches no period source exactly. Asquith’s reported words in 1922 were “Keep a diary, my dear, and later on, perhaps, the diary will keep you”; Langtry’s in 1925 were “Keep a diary, my dear, and some day perhaps your diary will keep you”; West’s in 1937 were “I always say, keep a diary and someday it’ll keep you.” All three are transcribed on the QI page ↗ — the version in general use is a smoothing of them, not a quotation of any one.
✓Mae West gave the joke its famous nine words in 1937; on the evidence assembled by Quote Investigator ↗, the joke itself belongs to Margot Asquith, reported at a dinner party in May 1922.
Context
Why the joke worked
Margot Asquith kept voluminous diaries, and her two-volume Autobiography — published in 1920 and 1922 — was built out of them. The 1922 newspaper filler catches her deflecting a compliment about the book’s success across a dinner table: the diaries had, quite literally, started paying her. The line lands because it parodies a proverb every reader already knew, “Keep your shop and your shop will keep you.”
Then it detached from her. By September 1925 a Boston paper was telling the identical anecdote about Lillie Langtry, congratulated on her memoirs at a London dinner. Twelve years after that, Mae West tightened it into nine words and put it in a script — and because film travels further than filler items, her compression is the version the internet now quotes back at her.
“Keep a diary, my dear, and later on, perhaps, the diary will keep you.”
The proverb being parodied
“Keep your shop and your shop will keep you” is an old English saying with a very long history; The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs records an instance in the 1605 play Eastward Ho, in the form “Touchstone, keepe thy shopp, and thy shoppe will keepe thee.” Swap the shop for a diary and the joke assembles itself — which is part of why several witty women could plausibly have arrived at it independently, and why it reattached so easily from one to the next.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1864–1945 · British socialite, diarist and memoirist
Emma Alice Margaret “Margot” Asquith, Countess of Oxford and Asquith, was a British socialite and author, and the wife of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith. She was known for her wit, and in late Victorian society belonged to the aristocratic circle of intellectuals called The Souls. She was also a prolific diarist: her two-volume Autobiography (1920 and 1922) drew on those journals, and it was the success of that book that prompted the remark about diaries at a dinner party.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Earliest documented instance
“Turn About” (filler item), Schenectady Gazette (Schenectady, NY), 25 May 1922, page 6, column 8. Earliest instance in the chronology assembled by Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: Keep a Diary, and Perhaps Someday It Will Keep You,” 11 May 2014. Mae West’s screen version — “I always say, keep a diary and someday it’ll keep you” — is from her screenplay for Every Day’s a Holiday (Paramount, 1937).
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Keep a Diary, and Perhaps Someday It Will Keep You’?” Last verified 7 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/keep-a-diary-and-perhaps-someday-it-will-keep-you/