Virginia Woolf Quotes

All that we can't say is all we need to hear.

Saying nothing... sometimes says the most.

We spend so much time listening to the things people are saying that we rarely pay attention to the things they don't.

What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead.

Speech may be barren; but it is ridiculous to suppose that silence is always brooding on a nestful of eggs.

What I don't write is as important as what I write.

Some of the most profound truths about us are things that we stop saying in the middle.

What a people talk about means something. What they don't talk about means something.

It’s less the words they say than those they leave unsaid that split old friends apart.

It is impossible to say all that we think, even to our truest Friend. We may bid him farewell forever sooner than complain, for our complaint is too well grounded to be uttered.

the words people do not speak are louder than the ones they do.

Dialogue is generally the worst choice for exposition. When you're writing lines you need to focus on the way people actually talk. And when we talk to each other we never actually explain our terms. We don't say 'Sweetheart, would you pass me the sugar bowl, which we picked up for a song at that antique stall in Munich.'

To choose to write is to reject silence.

Too many people seem to believe that silence was a void that needed to be filled, even if nothing important was said.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.

A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.

Sir, when two people have the extraordinary quality of this state, words are not necessary. Where that quality of love exists, words become unnecessary. There is instant communication.

Silence is one of the hardest kind of arguments to refute. There is no good substitute for wisdom; but silence is the best that has yet been discovered.

A novel seemed the easiest way to get what I had had in my head into the inside of other people's heads. Books are good that way.

I've heard Stephen King say that when you write a novel you end up revealing everything about yourself.

Good dialogue illuminates what people are not saying

I think I'm a reporter's editor. Being a good reporter is a specific skill, one I admire and don't possess myself - I appreciate people who know how to ask the right questions, who are excellent researchers, who know how to assemble information, and I enjoy working with them to shape their information into an article. Good reporters tend to be receptive to editing, and to a more collaborative form of writing in general, and you always end up learning more from how they work than you expect you will.

When I say nothing, I say everything

With a novel, you have to have a story. It's much more important to have it matter to the reader what happens to people, and it has to make sense and end in a way that is satisfying. So I spend a lot more time thinking about that. Then the writing itself usually is easier for me, because I know where it's going.