Quotes On Writing - A Collection of Famous Writers

Virginia Woolf

"Read a thousand books and your words will flow like a river."

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"The art of writing [is] imagining that one is not oneself, but somebody different."

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"I want to write a novel about silence. The things people don't say."

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"I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual."

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

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

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"Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works."

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"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."

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

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

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"Books are the mirrors of the soul."

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

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"I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person."

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"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."

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"No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself."

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"My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness."

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"Thinking is my fighting."

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"It is from the middle class that writers spring, because it is in the middle class only that the practice of writing is as natural and habitual as hoeing a field or building a house."

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"You cannot find peace by avoiding life."

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"Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends."

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"I am rooted, but I flow."

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"Freedom is a state of mind."