Virginia Woolf Quotes

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

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

A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.

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

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.

For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.

All the time she writing the world had continued.

As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.

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

He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and become famous; yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a well-turned line.