Quotes About Writing

It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or a woman pure and simple.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied

Read a thousand books and your words will flow like a river.

Avete idea di quanti libri si scrivono sulle donne in un anno? Avete idea di quanti sono scritti da uomini? Sapete di essere l'animale forse più discusso dell'universo?

I prefer, where truth is important, to write fiction.

For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the inkpot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.

I have written this book quicker than any other," she notes in her diary, "[and] it is all a joke; & yet gay & quick reading I think; a writers holiday. I feel more and more sure that I will never write a novel again

It is a still stranger thing that there is nothing so delightful in the world as telling stories. It is far pleasanter than writing reviews of famous novels.

Do you have any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?

When bedtime came the difficulty was to write to Bonamy, Jacob found. Yet he had seen Salamis, and Marathon in the distance. Poor old Bonamy! No; there was something queer about it. He could not write to Bonamy.

What she said in To the Lighthouse of Lily Briscoe's art she might have said of her own: that the pen was 'the one dependable thing in a world of strife, ruin, chaos . . .',73 and the godlike power she felt as a writer is perfectly embodied in a passage from that novel.

She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot. How could she help but die young, cramped and thwarted?

Shakespeare is getting flyblown; a paternal government might well forbid writing about him, as they put his monument at Stratford beyond the reach of scribbling fingers. With all this buzz of criticism about, one may hazard one's conjectures privately, make one's notes in the margin; but, knowing that someone has said it before, or said it better, the zest is gone. Illness, it its kingly sublimity, sweeps all that aside and leaves nothing but Shakespeare and oneself.

But whatever effect discouragement and criticism had upon their writing—and I believe that they had a very great effect

Una donna deve avere soldi e una stanza suoi propri se vuole scrivere romanzi.

it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.

a woman writing thinks back through her mothers.

In short, every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works, yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound the other. That time hangs heavy on people's hands is the only explanation of the monstrous growth.

La indiferencia del mundo, que Keats, Flaubert y otros han encontrado tan difícil de soportar, en el caso de la mujer no era indiferencia, sino hostilidad. El mundo no le decía a ella como les decía a ellos: Escribe si quieres; a mí no me importa. El mundo le decía burlándose: ¿Escribir? ¿Para qué quieres tú escribir?.

Words belong to each other, although, of course, only a great writer knows that the word incarnadine belongs to multitudinous seas.

Have you any notion of how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?

Alas! a woman that attempts the pen, Such a presumptuous creature is esteemed, The fault can by no virtue be redeemed. They tell us we mistake our sex and way; Good breeding, fashion, dancing, dressing, play, Are the accomplishments we should desire; To write, or read, or think, or to enquire, Would cloud our beauty, and exhaust our time, And interrupt the conquests of our prime, Whilst the dull manage of a servile house Is held by some our utmost art and use.

What has seven editions (the book had already gone into no less) got to do with the value of it? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself — a voice answering a voice.

Una mujer debe tener dinero y una habitación propia para poder escribir novelas; y esto, como veis, deja sin resolver el gran problema de la verdadera naturaleza de la mujer y la verdadera naturaleza de la novela.