Virginia Woolf Quotes

Everybody's a complex person. Everybody. Everybody's nuanced.

Humans are the most complicated, nuanced things that exist. We can't be reduced to labels or summed up with five traits - even if they are the Big Five.

No psychological grid works, because if you try to place every personality in one particular grid then you'd need about 4 billion grids because we are all so unique.

I thought how you can never tell just by looking at them what they were thinking or what was happening In their lives. Even when you got daft people or drunk people on buses, people that went on stupid and shouted rubbish or tried to tell you all about themselves, you could never really tell about them either... I knew if somebody looked at me, they'd know nothing about me, either.

The most futile thing in this world is any attempt, perhaps, at exact definition of character. All individuals are a bundle of contradictions - none more so than the most capable.

there's no use trying to live in other people's opinions. The only thing to do is live in your own.

The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.

It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.

The peculiar striations that define someone's personality are too numerous to know, no matter how close the observer. A person we think we know can suddenly become someone else when previously hidden strands of his character are called to the fore by circumstance.

My temperament is my strongest thing according for the people that know me best.

You have to get inside the people you are writing about. You have to go below the surface. And that's to a very large degree what all writers are doing - they're trying to get below the surface. Whether it's in fiction or poetry or writing history and biography. Some people make that possible because they write wonderful letters and diaries. And you have to sort of go where the material is.

I just try to do what I'm interested in and hope that some people will connect.

Anyone who is considered funny will tell you, sometimes without your even asking, that deep inside they are very serious, neurotic, introspective people.

People project their own dreams, fantasies, and prejudices onto my life. So people are either fans, or jealous, or disagree. Everybody marches to a different drummer.

In the light of her son's comment she reconsidered the scene at the mosque, to see whose impression was correct. Yes it could be worked into quite an unpleasant scene. The doctor had begun by bullying her, had said Mrs Callendar was nice, and then - finding the ground safe - had changed; he had alternately whined over his grievances and patronized her, had run a dozen ways in a single sentence, had been unreliable, inquisitive, vain. Yes, it was all true, but how false as a summary of the man; the essential life of him had been slain.

A writer is trying to create believable people in credible moving situations in the most moving way he can.

the only people worth writing about are those about whom the last word cannot be said.

There's so many people out there who try to imitate what I do but I am the original.

I have noticed several times that people don't think I know how to behave even when I'm trying as hard as I can.

I just do what I do because it feels right. Other people attach labels to that.

People are more than just the way they look.

It's hard to get along with people. As much as you try to like them and accept them as individuals, it becomes difficult because they keep getting out of line and wasting your time.

People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.

Our self-love can less bear to have our tastes than our opinions condemned.

You cannot borrow half of who you are from someone else, yet people try to do it all of the time, they just call it a relationship!