Virginia Woolf Quotes

All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.

For the vision of a novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his characters and apart from them must stand something stable to which he relates them; specialised because since he is a single person with one sensibility the aspects of life in which he can believe with conviction are strictly limited

So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words.

As for my next book I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear pendant gravid asking to be cut or it will fall.

He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.

If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance very various heroic and mean splendid and sordid infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme as great as a man some think even better.

Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are perhaps the most discussed animal in the universe?

It is in our idleness in our dreams that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.