“I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.”
More from Virginia Woolf on Writing
“And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.”
“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”
“For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.”
“Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?”
“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 must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
“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.”
“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”
“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.”
Others on Writing
Ernest Hemingway
17 quotes“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Somerset Maugham
12 quotes“we do not write as we want but as we can”
Salman Rushdie
11 quotes“I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.”
Kafka
10 quotes“Writing is prayer.”
Flaubert
9 quotes“A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.”
Ray Bradbury
9 quotes“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.”
Jorge Luis Borges
8 quotes“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”
Flannery O'Connor
7 quotes“Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.”
Harold Bloom
7 quotes“Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.”
Ezra Pound
6 quotes“This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
6 quotes“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”
Madeleine L'Engle
6 quotes“A book comes and says, 'Write me.”