Virginia Woolf Quotes

The pen is the tongue of the mind.

In the world of words the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.

When the public doesn't understand me, it's a battle. So when I choose words, I choose them for their musicality, rhythm, and sense, and I choose the right dialect to express that.

Poetry and imagination begin life. A child will fall on its knees on the gravel walk at the sight of a pink hawthorn in full flower, when it is by itself, to praise God for it.

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

Personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing.

An artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way

Writing is a creative art form and the acting and directing is more of an interpretive art form.

Art is science made flesh.

Art is the expression of imagination, not the reproduction of reality.

Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all - no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself - a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.

Men are born to write. The gardener saves every slip, and seed, and peach-stone: his vocation is to be a planter of plants. Not less does the writer attend his affair. Whatever he beholds or experiences, comes to him as a model, and sits for its picture. He counts it all nonsense that they say, that some things are undescribable. He believes that all that can be thought can be written, first or last; and he would report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it.

The notion of sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed--the whole thing was absurdly beyond his desires.

Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.

All art is a form of artifice.For in art there can be no prejudices.

There is no adequate definition for creative writing, any more than it is possible to describe pain or flavor or color.

Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction.

I try and make little stories. Whether it's with a pencil or with bits of records, it's really the same thing.

Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.

Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite - getting something down.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

I find I can write for two lines, and then I have nothing else to say. For me, the only way to find something comes through the sentence level and sticking with the sentences that give a subtle feeling that there's something more to say.

To give a body and a perfect form to one's thought, this - and only this - is to be an artist.

My greatest joy comes from creativity: from feeling that I have been able to identify a certain aspect of human nature and crystallise a phenomenon in words.