Virginia Woolf Quotes

There're no novels that I like to read so I write my own novels, and then I read them again, and it's the best thing.

I can't say that I love writing, but I do love the satisfaction that it gives me.

I may be writing well, I may be writing poorly, but I enjoy the act of writing and sometimes when it turns out okay, I feel an elation that is incomparable.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

I write for myself - but it is nice when other people like it, too!

Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.

The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me.

I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.

I'm writing for the sake of writing music. Whether it gets heard or not isn't an issue for me. It keeps my own juices going and my mind active.

Writing is its own reward.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song.

[On writing:] The most egotistic of occupations, and the most gratifying while it lasts.

There is no trick to it. If you like to write and want to write, you write, no matter where you are or what else you are doing or whether anyone pays any heed.

Writing has nothing to do with publishing. Nothing. People get totally confused about that. You write because you have to - you write because you can't not write. The rest is show-business. I can't state that too strongly. Just write - worry about the rest of it later, if you worry at all. What matters is what happens to you while you're writing the story, the poem, the play. The rest is show-business.

When I'm writing, I really want to satisfy myself. I've got a story that I am working on and struggling with, and I want to tell it the most effective way I can. That's really what I struggle with. And the thought of who may be reading it may be there somewhere in the back of my mind - I'll never say it's not there because I don't know - but it's not really what I'm thinking about.

One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.

Real writers write because they love to write. They don't write for public acclaim.

If what you want to do is write, then it's madness not to do it.

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

The act of writing is either something the writer dreads or actually likes, and I actually like it. Even re-writing's fun. You're getting somewhere, whether it seems to move or not.

The act of writing means you wish to communicate. Whether you're writing a memoir for yourself you put in a drawer, or you write a poem and you send it to a little magazine, or you write for publication, it always means - the form follows function.

If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.

There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression.