Virginia Woolf Quotes

Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.

I don't know what I think until I write it down.

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker. It has always been hard for me to say exactly what I mean in speech But if I have written a clumsiness, I may erase it.

Some minds remain open long enough for the truth not only to enter but to pass on through by way of a ready exit without pausing anywhere along the route.

It's technically extremely difficult to get down what you really mean, not what you think you mean, or what you think sounds good, but what's really there, what you really have to express, in words that somehow convey that meaning in an approximate way.

I write, or used to write, to explain to myself situations I couldn't otherwise solve or understand. Meditation comes very naturally to me.

Writing is incredibly important to me as a way of handling the world, understanding how it works.

I was a little truth seeker as a child. I wanted more than anything to understand myself and also other people.

If you take a lie and allow your desire for the truth, you'll end up with some truth - not fact, but something that gets you closer to the truth. That's what we want. When we go to a play, we need to be assured that the experience we're having.

To be a writer is to connect and to play and to attempt to see clearly and understand. It astounds me regularly that feeling things deeply and writing them down is basically my job description.

What writing does is to reveal.

I feel like if you can describe something fully and accurately, then people will be able to see it themselves - they don't need be told what to.

The main thing is to know something and to say it.

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.

Data is not necessarily information. Information does not necessarily lead to knowledge. And knowledge is not always sufficient to discover truth and breed wisdom.

Sometimes writing it is a good way to understand something.

Write about what you know, that's what I say.

We do not find truth groveling through error.

You're always thinking, "What does that add up to?" You can't really get a handle on it. I was curious. I felt like it would be an interesting challenge for me to write down what I'd seen and done and learned - all the convolutions captured in one item that I could look at and get some grip on what the hell happened.

No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage-ground of truth.

Deep is the well of truth and long does it take to know what has fallen into its depths.

Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.

The writing begins when you’ve finished. Only then do you know what you’re trying to say.

If you dont [sic] say what you want, what's the sense of writing?