Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
People only become writers if they can't find the one book they've always wanted to read. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?” — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
I got out this diary, & read as one always does read one's own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
As an experience, madness is terrific ... and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one's words. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
O why do I ever let anyone read what I write! Every time I have to go through a breakfast with a… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bear was in… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Thus the British Empire came into existence; and thus - for there is no stopping damp; it gets into the inkpot as… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
[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 Copy Share Image
I must try to set aside half an hour in some part of my day, and consecrate it to diary writing. Give… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“I should like to write four lines at a time, describing the same feeling, as a musician does; because it always seems… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Are they not criminals, books that have wasted our time and sympathy; are they not the most insidious enemies of society, corrupters,… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
Does housekeeping interest you at all? I think it really ought to be just as good as writing and I never see… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“The writer has us by the hand, forces us along her road, makes us see what she sees, never leaves us for… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature.… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties -- one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman's… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
But the novels of women were not affected only by the necessarily narrow range of the writer's experience. They showed, at least… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Do you know I get such a passion for reading sometimes its like the other passion -writing- only the wrong side of… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
As I grow old I hate the writing of letters more and more, and like getting them better and better. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or a woman… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
For the film maker must come by his convention, as painters and writers and musicians have done before him. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
I got out this diary and read, as one always reads one's own writing; with a kind of guilty intensity. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Joy's life in the doing (..) I mean it's the writing, not the being read that excites me.” — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
There was a day when I liked writing letters -- it has gone. Unfortunately the passion for getting them remains. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
A writer should give direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured into the wine. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
A thousand things to be written had I time: had I power. A very little writing uses up my capacity for writing. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
It is from the middle class that writers spring, because, it is in the middle class only that the practice of writing… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
if newspapers were written by people whose sole object in writing was to tell the truth about politics and the truth about… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“The train slows and lengthens, as we approach London, the centre, and my heart draws out too, in fear, in exaltation. I am about… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword. On one side all is correct, definite, orderly; the paths… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Other worshipful objects were content with worship; men, women, God, all let one kneel prostrate; but this form, were it only the shape of… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Sometimes he woke with a brain like lead; at others it was as if a thousand wax tapers were alight and people were throwing… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman's life -… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
A veil of insanity everywhere: Oh why I was born in this age? It is a terrible age. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
Love ought to stop on both sides, don’t you think, simultaneously?’ He spoke without any stress on the words, so as not to wake… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“It is so vast an alleviation to be able to point for another to look at. And then not to talk. To follow the… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! (...) I think I could happily live here & read forever.” — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“For one's children so often gave one's own perceptions a little thrust forwards.” — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“She would not say of anyone in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
![“[Final diary entry:] Occupation is essential. And now with some pleasure I find that it's seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.” quote by Virginia Woolf](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/8b4/virginia-woolf-49_career_final-diary-entry-occupation-is-essentia_578124.jpg)
