Writing Quotes by Virginia Woolf

“She was writing for everybody, for nobody, for our age, for her own...”

— Virginia Woolf

Writing is still like heaving bricks over a wall.

— Virginia Woolf

writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial.

— Virginia Woolf

It doesn't have to be the truth, just your vision of it, written down.

— Virginia Woolf

I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual

— Virginia Woolf

I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

All the time she writing the world had continued.

— Virginia Woolf

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or…

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

“What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one's words.

— Virginia Woolf

As I grow old I hate the writing of letters more and more, and like getting them better and better.

— Virginia Woolf

Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections.

— Virginia Woolf

“Do you know I get such a passion for reading sometimes its like the other passion -writing- only the wrong side of…

— Virginia Woolf

[Final diary entry:] Occupation is essential. And now with some pleasure I find that it's seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and…

— Virginia Woolf

“I should like to write four lines at a time, describing the same feeling, as a musician does; because it always seems…

— Virginia Woolf

I must try to set aside half an hour in some part of my day, and consecrate it to diary writing. Give…

— Virginia Woolf

“Are they not criminals, books that have wasted our time and sympathy; are they not the most insidious enemies of society, corrupters,…

— Virginia Woolf

Does housekeeping interest you at all? I think it really ought to be just as good as writing and I never see…

— Virginia Woolf

Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the…

— Virginia Woolf

It is from the middle class that writers spring, because, it is in the middle class only that the practice of writing…

— Virginia Woolf

For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person.…

— 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…

— Virginia Woolf

So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat.…

— Virginia Woolf

“Recall, then, some event that has left a distinct impression on you---how at the corner of the street, perhaps, you passed two…

— Virginia Woolf

The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature.…

— Virginia Woolf

“There she sits in the corner of the carriage—that carriage which is travelling, not from Richmond to Waterloo, but from one age…

— Virginia Woolf

“The writer has us by the hand, forces us along her road, makes us see what she sees, never leaves us for…

— Virginia Woolf

“It proves that one's life is not confined to one's body and what one says or does; one is living all the…

— Virginia Woolf

Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties -- one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so…

— Virginia Woolf

“However, the majority of women are neither harlots nor courtesans; nor do they sit clasping pug dogs to dusty velvet all through…

— Virginia Woolf

“But she had to write. And one letter to the Times, she used to say to Miss Brush, cost her more than…

— Virginia Woolf

“Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be…

— Virginia Woolf

“... it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman…

— Virginia Woolf

“But Orlando was a woman — Lord Palmerston had just proved it. And when we are writing the life of a woman,…

— Virginia Woolf

“Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life,…

— Virginia Woolf

The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea.

— Virginia Woolf

It's the writing, not the being read, that excites me. Joy is in the doing.

— Virginia Woolf