Books Quote by David Mikics

“Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice.”

— Virginia Woolf

“To quote Virginia Woolf, “If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to…

— Pamela Paul

Woolf is an important writer for me, someone I read often and who forms part of my ideal of what literature can do.

— Garth Greenwell

“Woolf liberates the text, the imagination, the fictional character, and then demands that liberty for ourselves, most particularly for women.”

— Rebecca Solnit

“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for the…

— Tracie Podger

“It is important to recognise Woolf ’s acknowledgement of her father’s dually formative influence. The domestic dictator was also an intellectual who powerfully shaped…

— Jane Goldman

“Writer: It's not an occupation; it's a compulsion.”

— Teresa Nielsen Hayden

“You may make a writer or a scholar of him, but you'll not make anything else. You may make up your mind of that.”

— C.S. Lewis

“We must remember that what a writer does to people is not necessarily what he intends to do. It may be only what people…

— T.S. Eliot

“Reading Proust nearly silenced Virginia Woolf. She loved his novel, but loved it rather too much. There wasn’t enough wrong with it—a crushing recognition…

— Alain de Botton

“Woolf turned her back on a number of tokens of her rising eminence in the 1930s, including an offer of the Companion of Honour…

— Jane Goldman

“Nobody ever recommended or even desired that I be a novelist - in fact, some tried to stop me. I had the idea to…

— Haruki Murakami