Virginia Woolf quotes:

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  • My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes. -- Joyce Carol Oates
  • Virginia Woolf was wrong. You do not need a room of your own to write. -- Julia Glass
  • In school, I was Martha in 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' I loved that. -- Cara Delevingne
  • At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on æ?¢700 a year. -- Ian Mcewan
  • Virginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I'll go a step further. You must be bisexual. -- Rita Mae Brown
  • I like reading... French, Russian classics - Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert. I also like Hemingway, Virginia Woolf. -- Andrea Bocelli
  • Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's afraid of the big bad wolf ... who's afraid of living life without false illusions. -- Edward Albee
  • When I saw Virginia Woolf, somewhere between the first and second acts, someone I had known as my mother became somebody else. -- Kiefer Sutherland
  • I think throughout the 20th century, for some reason, serious writers increasingly had contempt for the average reader. You can really see this in the letters of such people as Joyce and Virginia Woolf. -- Michel Faber
  • There is something so hopeful about a diary, a journal, a new notebook, which Joan Didion and Virginia Woolf both wrote about. A blog. Perhaps we all are waiting for someone to discover us. -- Lily Koppel
  • I fell in love with Virginia Woolf in college. I especially admire how well she writes about daily life, how she captures so much meaning and consequence in the smallest details of a day. -- Karen Thompson Walker
  • I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I'd hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy. -- Anne Lamott
  • No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Hemingway's postwar novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war. -- J. G. Ballard
  • I think the kind of unexpected I really love is when you open books and the actual way of writing is different and interesting. Like reading Virginia Woolf for the first time or Lawrence Durrell for the first time. -- Lalla Ward
  • If you're writing an opinion piece, it's your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions. -- David Mamet
  • Vita Sackville-West is one of my favorite female icons. She was a writer and a prolific gardener, but she also had a relationship with Virginia Woolf, and she was married to Sir Harold Nicolson. She was a woman who lived outside of norms. -- Gwendoline Christie
  • Virginia Woolf came along in the early part of the century and essentially said through her writing, yes, big books can be written about the traditional big subjects. There is war. There is the search for God. These are all very important things. -- Michael Cunningham
  • When you think about Broadway, you think broad and big, but the fact is there are so many plays that are very intimate, but fill a 1,500-seat house. Plays like 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' have deep moments of silence and intimacy to them. -- Steve Kazee
  • I grew up in a small town, in a small community, and I would not have had access to great plays when I was a kid were it not for the films of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' and 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.' -- Tracy Letts
  • It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends. -- Stephen Fry
  • Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I'm finishing, even if it's turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don't admit it, they're not being honest. -- Michael Cunningham
  • My earliest experience was reading Edward Albee's 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' at 8, you know, with a bunch of kids on my steps - on the stoops - and knowing that I wanted to direct them saying the lines. I don't really know how to articulate that 'cause there wasn't someone to show me. -- Lee Daniels
  • As an actor, to go and see those shows - great plays like 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' and Clifford Odets's 'Golden Boy' - it's so exhilarating. I'd personally love to perform the role of Jerry in Edward Albee's 'The Zoo Story.' He's a transient, lost soul, and an example of humanity at its rawest. -- Keegan Allen
  • I admire Virginia Woolf so much that I wonder why I don't like her more. She makes the inner things real, she does illumine, and she makes relationships realities as well as people. But I remember the intensity, the thrill, with which I read 'Passage to India.' How I would have hated anyone who took the book away from me. -- Susan Glaspell
  • Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? -- Edward Albee
  • Virginia Woolf was one example. She was called the "Lover of 100 Gangsters." -- Sergio Leone
  • Of Virginia Woolf: The talent of this generation which is most certain of survival. -- Rebecca West
  • At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year. -- Ian Mcewan
  • Virginia Woolf's writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere. -- Edith Sitwell
  • An otherwise happily married couple may turn a mixed doubles game into a scene from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. -- Rod Laver
  • Virginia Woolf, I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her 'a beautiful little knitter. -- Edith Sitwell
  • She pulled off Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and settled down in a comfortable leather chair by the fire to read. -- Lucinda Riley
  • There's a great quote about Virginia Woolf, she had the same spiritual stake in her diaries as she had in her writing. -- Sam Abell
  • If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way. -- Alan Bennett
  • In other words, [ H.P. Lovecraft] was areligious, asexual, neurasthenic, he just didn't want to react to the world. Like Virginia Woolf, who considered religion the ultimate obscenity. -- Paul Laffoley
  • Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old. -- Michael Cunningham
  • I loved languages, and loved learning languages. It was fantastic. But I was alone there. I remember that time as a real Virginia Woolf time. More than any language it was her language that influenced me. -- Lily King
  • Who was it who said that every virtue contains its corresponding vice? C.S. Lewis? Virginia Woolf? You forget. But it has always worried you that what the virtue of wit contained was the vice of scorn. -- Kevin Brockmeier
  • I can't imagine otherwise - I guess Virginia Woolf could write wonderful novels where the women never have sex, and her novels work. But for me, I don't think I could write a plot without sex happening somewhere. -- Shirley Geok-lin Lim
  • Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title. - Virginia Woolf, from Jacob's Room Television is chewing gum for the eyes. -- Frank Lloyd Wright
  • Each time I undertake to reread Virginia Woolf, I am somewhat baffled by the signature breathlessness and relentlessly "poetic" tone, the shimmering impressionism, so very different from the vivid, precise, magisterial (and often very funny) prose of her contemporary James Joyce. -- Joyce Carol Oates
  • I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for Virginia Woolf to make up her novels -- Rebecca Solnit
  • Frank Morley, who had worked in London at Faber and Faber, was the new head of Harcourt Brace, and he hired me to start in 1940. The early years at Harcourt were wonderful. Almost my first assignment was Virginia Woolf's novel 'Between the Acts.' -- Robert Giroux
  • In "Virginia Woolf" I had a thing which the grips called the paraplegic which was a wheelchair thing that I had made up years before where I could stand on this bicycle-like device and be pushed down the hall, and then step off it with a handheld camera. -- Haskell Wexler
  • Like all her friends, I miss her greatly...But...I am sure there is no case for lamentation...Virginia Woolf got through an immense amount of work, she gave acute pleasure in new ways, she pushed the light of the English language a little further against darkness. Those are facts. -- E. M. Forster
  • A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talkshow host with an orange face... It didn't add up. Suicide wasn't invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And Me. Suicide was supposed to be cool. -- Nick Hornby
  • When I saw what painting had done in the last thirty years, what literature had done - people like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway - in France we have Nathalie Sarraute - and paintings became so strongly contemporary while cinema was just following the path of theater. I have to do something which relates with my time, and in my time, we make things differently. -- Agnes Varda
  • Plot involves fragmentary reality, and it might involve composite reality. Fragmentary reality is the view of the individual. Composite reality is the community or state view. Fragmentary reality is always set against composite reality. Virginia Woolf did this by creating fragmentary monologues and for a while this was all the rage in literature. She was a genius. In the hands of the merely talented it came off like gibberish. -- Rita Mae Brown
  • Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: "I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going. -- Virginia Woolf
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