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Virginia Woolf Quotes about Writing

All Virginia Woolf Quotes Adventure Age Aging Art Beach Beauty Belief Bitterness Blame Bones Chaos Character Charity Children Communication Consciousness Country Creativity Criticism Darkness Death Desire Difficulty Diversity Doubt Duty Dying Earth Effort Essays Feelings Feminism Fighting Flying Freedom Friendship Funny Genius Giving Goodness Growing Up Happiness Hate Hatred Healing Heart Heaven History Home Honesty House Human Nature Hurt Illness Imagination Independence Inspiration Inspirational Intimacy Joy Judging Language Life Literature Love Lust Lying Madness Memories Moon Morning Motivational Nature Pain Passion Past Peace Perception Personality Philosophy Pleasure Praise Quality Reading Reality Reflection Running Sadness Safety Silence Silver Singing Skins Sleep Solitude Soul Spring Stress Style Suffering Tea Time Today Tragedy Travel Truth Vision Waiting Wall War Water Weed Wine Winter Writing quotes

Writing is still like heaving bricks over a wall.

Writing is still like heaving bricks over a wall.

Wall, Writing, Bricks

Virginia Woolf (1976). “The question of things happening”, Vintage

The way to write well is to live intensely.

Writing, Way, Wells

I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot.

Writing, Plot, Rhythm

Virginia Woolf (2000). “The Waves”, p.5, Wordsworth Editions

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet. . . indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Wise, Mother, Writing

A Room of One's Own ch. 3 (1929)

One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one's words.

Writing, Sea, Bottom

Virginia Woolf (1981). “Mrs. Dalloway”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.

Writing, People, Silence

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.194, Delphi Classics

As I grow old I hate the writing of letters more and more, and like getting them better and better.

Hate, Writing, Letters

Virginia Woolf (1975). “The letters of Virginia Woolf”

For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

Writing, Heart, Wind

Virginia Woolf (2015). “Orlando”, p.149, Booklassic

It is from the middle class that writers spring, because, it is in the middle class only that the practice of writing is as natural and habitual as hoeing a field or building a house.

Spring, Writing, Practice

Virginia Woolf (2013). “The Common Reader”, p.344, Lulu Press, Inc

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Women, Writing, Words Of Wisdom

A Room of One's Own ch. 1 (1929)

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Writing, Soul, Secret

Virginia Woolf, Michael H. Whitworth (2014). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.122, Oxford University Press, USA

Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.

Writing, Doe, Finals

Virginia Woolf, Nigel Nicolson (1979). “The Letters of Virginia Woolf: 1929-1931”, Harcourt on Demand

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

Life, Writing, Attachment

The most extraordinary thing about writing is that when you've struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong.

Writing, Thinking, Effort

Virginia Woolf (1984). “The Diary of Virginia Woolf: 1936-1941”, Harcourt

I mean it's the writing, not the being read, that excites me.

Writing, Joy

"A Writer's Diary".

I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual

Optimistic, Writing, Usual

Virginia Woolf (1978). “The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol.2, 1920-1924”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.

Writing, Together, Crafts

Virginia Woolf (2006). “To the Lighthouse”, p.4, OUP Oxford

When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.

Writing, Darkness, Existence

Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.97, Virginia Woolf

a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living - so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes, and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination.

Book, Writing, Discovery

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.3994, Delphi Classics

The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea.

Art, Philosophy, Writing

Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.21, Oxford University Press

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Writing, Men, Others Opinions

A Room of One's Own (1929) ch. 3

Now the writer, I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of ... reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.

Writing, Reality, Thinking

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.2687, Delphi Classics

Writing is a divine art, and the more I write and read the more I love it.

Art, Writing, Divine

Virginia Woolf (1975). “The Letters of Virginia Woolf: 1888-1912 (Virginia Stephen)”, Harcourt on Demand

And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is a woman's whole existence.

Writing, Demand, May

Virginia Woolf (2005). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.530, Wordsworth Editions

Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections.

Time, Writing, Reflection

Virginia Woolf (2003). “A Writer's Diary”, p.21, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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