Writing Quotes by Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

— Virginia Woolf

The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.

— Virginia Woolf

“...a woman writing thinks back through her mothers.”

— Virginia Woolf

It is the duty of the writer to describe.

— Virginia Woolf

To know whom to write for is to know how to write.

— Virginia Woolf

“I will write," she had said, "what I enjoy writing.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

You have a touch in letter writing that is beyond me. Something unexpected, like coming round a corner in a rose garden…

— Virginia Woolf

When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.

— Virginia Woolf

to write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a…

— Virginia Woolf

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

— Virginia Woolf

I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words.

— Virginia Woolf

As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant,…

— Virginia Woolf

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

— Virginia Woolf

“the time coming when I can endure to read my own writing in print without blushing—shivering and wishing to take cover?”

— Virginia Woolf

every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works,…

— Virginia Woolf

“Unpraised, I find it hard to start writing in the morning; but the dejection lasts only 30 minutes, and once I start…

— Virginia Woolf

“She was almost felled to the ground by the extraordinary sight which now met her eyes. There was the garden and some…

— Virginia Woolf

“Sometimes it seems to me that I shall never write out all the books I have in my head, because of the…

— Virginia Woolf

“These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device - a means of summing up and making a knot of…

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. ... Women, then, have not…

— Virginia Woolf

... the transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age is one of infinite delicacy, and upon a nice arrangement…

— Virginia Woolf

“In your modesty you seem to consider that writers are of different blood and bone from yourselves; that they know more of…

— Virginia Woolf

“Shakespeare is getting flyblown; a paternal government might well forbid writing about him, as they put his monument at Stratford beyond the…

— Virginia Woolf

Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people's lips, in their…

— Virginia Woolf

“…the art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea…. It is on the back of an idea, something…

— Virginia Woolf

“... All who have brought about a state of sex-consciousness are to blame, and it is they who drive me, when I…

— Virginia Woolf

Mr. Beerbohm in his way is perfect ... He has brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely, but so consciously and…

— Virginia Woolf

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or…

— Virginia Woolf

Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she…

— 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

“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

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

— 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

I feel that by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else.

— Virginia Woolf

I mean it's the writing, not the being read, that excites me.

— Virginia Woolf