Virginia Woolf Quotes

The truth is I tried to write for years and I wasn't very good.

When one has no particular talent for anything, one takes to the pen.

I wrote as a teenager, and once I started acting, you know, you're learning lines, you're doing other people's words, it takes up a lot of time. Especially if you're dedicated to what you're doing, you're trying to do a decent job at it. But I would have said to myself, "Write more, please."

These were all middle-class kids from literary backgrounds, joining this sort of train going by, this pop train, jumping on. Whereas the rest of the rock scene, you'll find that there's mostly working-class people.

Creative writing and shooting are muscles that atrophy. But when you work them, you become a self-generator who can branch out.

If you asked someone, 'Can you play the violin?' and he says, 'I don't know, I have not tried, perhaps I can,' you laugh at him. Whereas about writing, people always say: 'I don't know, I have not tried,' as though one had only to try and one would become a writer.

Everybody can write; writers can't do anything else.

When I take up my pen, nothing can happen to me. Fate, remember that.

Ironically, writing a novel is not a way to sort out your confusion.

Writing is my only interest. Even speaking is an interruption.

Everything I know about life I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write.

My advice to would-be young authors is to read a lot, write a lot, and not worry about creating a finished product. Keeping a journal is not a bad idea either.

The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.

I don't know anything but writing practice, and so what I really do is direct that energy as if it were flowing down a river.

I remember liking to write stories pretty early on. In fourth or fifth grade, they would give us the beginning of a story, and we were supposed to finish it. I remember liking that. But I didn't think about deciding to become a writer until high school at about the age of 16.

Writing is my number one passion. I've written two novels. I've written a screenplay. I also write short stories and poetry.

I love writing. I like reading, other people, not myself.

May God strike me down with a hammer on the head before I write a book with a teach-y goal!

Writing itself is a bad enough trade, rightly held up to ridicule and contempt by the greater part of mankind, and especially by those who do real work, plowing, riding, sailing

It may sound paradoxical, but verbal fluency is the product of many hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is the product of hours spent repeating scales.

Everything in my past, in my training, everything that has been most essential in my activity up to now has made me above all a man who writes, and it is too late for that to change.

If you want to write for yourself, get a diary. If you want to write for your friends, get a blog. If you want to write for others...become an author.

Writing ... is a profession that can only be learned by writing.

In the first place, all books that get fairly into the vital air of the world were written by the successful class, by the affirming and advancing class, who utter what tens of thousands feel though they cannot say.

Well, I have to write. A lot of people forget that. They think I’m sort of crazy baffoon who can’t make up his mind what to do in life