Virginia Woolf - Writing Quotes

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

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

Virginia Woolf
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.

Virginia Woolf
Lord, how tired one gets of one's own writing.

Virginia Woolf
Margaret Ll. Davies writes that Janet is dying and will I write on her for The Times – a curious thought, rather: as if it mattered who wrote, or not. But this flooded me with the idea of Janet yesterday. I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person.

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

Virginia Woolf
Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?

Virginia Woolf
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.

Virginia Woolf
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.

Virginia Woolf
Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties—one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: 'This is what happened'; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. Who was I then? Adeline Virginia Stephen, the second daughter of Leslie and Julia Prinsep Stephen, born on 25th January 1882, descended from a great many people, some famous, others obscure; born into a large connection, born not of rich parents, but of well-to-do parents, born into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world.

Virginia Woolf
Writing is still like heaving bricks over a wall...

Virginia Woolf
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.

Virginia Woolf
In the past, the virtue of women's writing often lay in its divine spontaneity … But it was also, and much more often, chattering and garrulous … In future, granted time and books and a little space in the house for herself, literature will become for women, as for men, an art to be studied. Women's gift will be trained and strengthened. The novel will cease to be the dumping-ground for the personal emotions. It will become, more than at present, a work of art like any other, and its resources and its limitations will be explored.

Virginia Woolf