Virginia Woolf Quotes

Long sentences in a short composition are like large rooms in a little house.

I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made.

If you consistently write 'The sun set' rather than 'The sun sank slowly in the bright western sky,' your story will move three times as fast. Of course, there are times you want the longer version for atmosphere - but not many. Wordiness not only kills pace; it bores readers.

I tend to write short, brief snippets - I lean toward the chamber music end as opposed to the symphony end of things.

Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.

I cannot write long books; I leave that for those who have nothing to say.

Most writers write too much. I have the exact opposite problem. I feel I could write almost anything in a paragraph. I have a natural ability to condense, and so I often think, "Are you kidding me? Five thousand words? How am I gonna make 5,000 words out of that?"

The lessons learned in journalism also apply. Writing for NPR has taught me to cut a piece in half and then in half again - without losing the essence. Apply that to the swollen prose of a bulky novel and you might reveal a beautiful work.

Why the brevity? Because I'd rather people read my book twice than only half-way through

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Should novels generally be 600 pages? No, they should not. Half of writing, maybe 3/4 of writing, is editing. This seems to be a thing that has not gotten through to them. It's my impression that you could get rid of half of most of these books. These people are not good enough to be this long, but they're apparently also not good enough to be shorter.

Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say. Of course those who write short books have even less to say.

I think I'm succinct to the point of trying to write the two-word novel. Editing my work almost never means taking anything out but rather adding, because I'm always stripping down. I tend to under-write rather than over-write.

It has often been said there’s so much to be read, you never can cram all those words in your head. So the writer who breeds more words than he needs is making a chore for the reader who reads. That's why my belief is the briefer the brief is, the greater the sigh of the reader's relief is. And that's why your books have such power and strength. You publish with shorth! (Shorth is better than length.)

In a way, the main fault of all books is that they are too long.

I confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so, possessed as I am with a keener appreciation for brevity.

Poetry is very crafted. You can't have too many words. It needs compression. It has to be spare, just the right number of words.

Little books are the things to write at my age, I've decided. Avoid the big ones, go for the little ones.

What a labour writing is ... making one sentence do the work of a page; that's what I call hard work.

I think in most cases, unless you're writing about a character who is garrulous, you say what you've got to say and then get out. Those little conjunctions, those little turnaround words help you do it. That's the way I like to write: I get rid of things rather than add them.

A good rule for writers: do not explain overmuch.

If you can’t state your position in eight words, you don’t have a position.

One can only continue to expect to be read if one omits everything that is unimportant.

One of my heroes, almost necessarily from what I'm saying, of course, is Borges, who is a supreme master of doing thing -- being a data bank -- and the beauty of this economy is that he could have written War and Peace in three or four pages; who knows, it might have been a better book.

Never use a long word where a short one will do.