Quotes About Creativity

and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction

she heard some voice saying she couldn't paint, saying she couldn't create, as if she were caught up in one of those habitual currents in which after a certain time experience forms in the mind, so that one repeats words without being aware any longer who originally spoke them.

purely feminine; with that extraordinary gift, that woman's gift, of making a world of her own wherever she happened to be.

Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.

Shakespeare could not have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural saveragery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

I will write, she had said, what I enjoy writing.

You must remember that fiction is the mirror of life.

Swelling, perpetually augmented, there is a vast accumulation of unrecorded matter in my head.

Sometimes it seems to me that I shall never write out all the books I have in my head, because of the strain. The devilish thing about writing is that it calls upon every nerve to hold itself taut. This is exactly what I cannot do--

That wild flash of imagination, that lightning crack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred with poetry.

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.

They never saw him drawing pictures of them naked at their antics in his notebook.

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

We are the words; we are the music...

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

Y es que las obras maestras no son logros aislados y solitarios; son el resultado de muchos años de pensamiento en común, del pensamiento colectivo de muchas personas, de tal suerte que, tras esa voz individual, se encuentra la experiencia de la masa (p. 89).

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

And then there it was, suddenly entire shaped in her hands, beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete, the essence sucked out of life and held rounded here - the sonnet.

There's no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice; & that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.' (26 July 1922)

Sometimes he woke with a brain like lead; at others it was as if a thousand wax tapers were alight and people were throwing fireworks inside him.

They are very large in effect, these painters; very little self-conscious; they have smooth broad spaces in their minds where I am all prickles & promontories.

The truth is that I need the stimulus of other people. Alone, over my dead fire, I tend to see the thin places in my own stories. The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely, imagining. He would not integrate, as I do. He would not have this devastating sense of grey ashes in a burnt-out grate.

This fiddling and drifting and not impressing oneself upon anything – this always refraining and fingering and cutting things up into little jokes and facetiousness – that's what's so annihilating. Yet given little money, little looks, no special gift – what can one do? How could one battle? How could one leap on the back of life and wring its scruff?

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.