Quotes About Writing

Finché scrivete ciò che desiderate scrivere, questo è tutto ciò che conta.

I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters: I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, and each comes to daylight at the present moment" (Diary 2: 213).

he truth is that writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial.

They wrote as women write, not as men write. Of all the thousand women who wrote novels then, they alone entirely ignored the perpetual admonitions of the eternal pedagogue – write this, think that.

I want to write nothing in this book that I don't enjoy writing. Yet writing is always difficult.

Joy's life in the doing (..) I mean it's the writing, not the being read that excites me.

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea bite in comparison.

The title women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like; or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them; or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together

It is a profound truth that in 'every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place', as Woolf puts it, but for the writer that change is also a profound source of energy.

How he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in' was in ecstasy' in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings... and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.

How he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had good nights and bad mornings... and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.

They have been written in the red light of emotion and not in the white light of truth.

bir kad?n eÄŸer kurmaca yazacaksa, paras? ve kendine ait bir odas? olmal?d?r; ve göreceÄŸiniz gibi bu, kad?n?n gerçek doÄŸas?na ve kurmacan?n gerçek doÄŸas?na dair büyük sorunu çözümsüz b?rakmakta.

Charlotte Brontë, with all her splendid gift for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands. George Eliot committed atrocities with it that beggar description. Jane Austen looked at it and laughed at it and devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it. Thus, with less genius for writing than Charlotte Brontë, she got infinitely more said.

Tenéis alguna noción de cuántos libros se escriben al año sobre las mujeres?

it is necessary to have five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door if you are to write fiction or poetry.

Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction.

Thus, when one takes a sentence of Mr B into the mind it falls plump to the ground— dead; but when one takes a sentence of Coleridge into the mind, it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas, and that is the only sort of writing of which one can say that it has the secret of perpetual life.

All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point — a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.

She was haunted by the ghosts of phrases. She gave herself up to a sensual delight in the combinations of words. She sought them in the pages of her favorite authors.

No, delightful as the pastime of measuring be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes. So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.

I knew he was angry by this token. When I read when he wrote about women I thought, not of what he was saying, but of himself. When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument; and the reader cannot help thinking of the argument too. If he had written dispassionately about women had he used indisputable proofs to establish his argument and had shown no trace of wishing that the result would be one thing rather than another, one would not have been angry either.

Me atrevería a decir que Anon, que escribió tantos poemas sin firmarlos, era una mujer.

It is ten years since Virginia Woolf published her last volume of collected essays, THE COMMON READER: SECOND SERIES. At the time of her death she was already engaged in getting together essays for a further volume, which she proposed to publish in the autumn of 1941 or the spring Of 1942. She also intended to publish a new book of short stories, including in it some or all of MONDAY OR TUESDAY, which has been long out of print. She left