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Virginia Woolf Quotes about Writing - Page 3

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

The good diarist writes either for himself alone or for a posterity so distant that it can safely hear every secret and justly weigh every motive. For such an audience there is need neither of affectation nor of

The good diarist writes either for himself alone or for a posterity so distant that it can safely hear every secret and justly weigh every motive. For such an audience there is need neither of affectation nor of restraint. Sincerity is what they ask, detail, and volume; skill with the pen comes in conveniently, but brilliance is not necessary; genius is a hindrance even; and should you know your business and do it manfully, posterity will let you off mixing with great men, reporting famous affairs, or having lain with the first ladies in the land.

Writing, Men, Land

Virginia Woolf (1967). “Collected essays”

There was a day when I liked writing letters -- it has gone. Unfortunately the passion for getting them remains.

Passion, Writing, Gone

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

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

Writing, Attachment, Play

"A Room of One's Own". Essay by Virginia Woolf (Chapter 3, pp. 43-44), October 24, 1929.

Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.

Writing, Aunt, Greatness

Virginia Woolf, Andrew McNeillie (1986). “The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1925-1928”, Chatto & Windus

So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words.

Writing, Sea, Solitude

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

O why do I ever let anyone read what I write! Every time I have to go through a breakfast with a letter of criticism I swear I will write for my own praise or blame in future. It is a misery.

Writing, Criticism, Breakfast

Virginia Woolf, Nigel Nicolson, Joanne Trautmann, Joanne Trautmann Banks (1975). “The Flight of the Mind”

The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life...one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one's character, living in the brain.

Mistake, Reading, Writing

I got out this diary, & read as one always does read one's own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity.

Writing, Diaries, Kind

"The Diary of Virginia Woolf: 1915-1919".

I feel that by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else.

Writing, Feels

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4186, Delphi Classics

Does housekeeping interest you at all? I think it really ought to be just as good as writing and I never see where the separation between the too comes in. At least if you must put books on one side and life on the other, each is a poor and bloodless thing; but my theory is that they mix indistinguishable.

Book, Reading, Writing

As nobody can possibly tell me whether one's writing is bad or good, the only certain value is one's own pleasure. I am sure of that.

Writing, Pleasure, Certain

Virginia Woolf, Joanne Trautmann Banks (1975). “The Letters of Virginia Woolf: 1923-1928”, Harcourt on Demand

As an experience, madness is terrific ... and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about.

Writing, Lava, Madness

Virginia Woolf (1978). “A Reflection of the Other Person”, Chatto & Windus

[Final diary entry:] Occupation is essential. And now with some pleasure I find that it's seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.

Writing, Thinking, Occupation

Diary, 8 Mar. 1941.Woolf committed suicide on 28 Mar. 1941.

The world was going on as usual. All the time she was writing the world had continued.

Writing, World

"Orlando".

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

Money, Writing, Novel

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

Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the more you write the nicer you become.

Spiritual, Book, Writing

Virginia Woolf (1991). “Paper Darts”

What a labour writing is ... making one sentence do the work of a page; that's what I call hard work.

Hard Work, Writing, Pages

Virginia Woolf (1975). “The Letters of Virginia Woolf: 1932-1935”

women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. ... Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own.

Dog, Stress, Writing

Virginia Woolf, Morag Shiach (1998). “A Room of One's Own: And, Three Guineas”, p.141

writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial.

Writing, Profound, Pleasure

Virginia Woolf (2003). “A Writer's Diary”, p.87, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

To know whom to write for is to know how to write.

Writing, Know How, Knows

Virginia Woolf (2013). “The Common Reader”, p.167, Lulu Press, Inc

I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross: that it's to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish.

Believe, Writing, Sides

Virginia Woolf, Joanne Trautmann Banks (1977). “A Change of Perspective”, Chatto & Windus

A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.

Writing, Mind, Excellence

I'm fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It's an odd feeling though, writing aginst the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall.

Wall, Writing, Thinking

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4517, Delphi Classics

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

Writing, Literature, Ifs

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4409, Delphi Classics

You have a touch in letter writing that is beyond me. Something unexpected, like coming round a corner in a rose garden and finding it still daylight.

Writing, Garden, Rose

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