Virginia Woolf Quotes

I think it's about as likely Jane Austen was gay as that she was found out to be a man.

When I was an undergraduate I had very badly annotated editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which left out the important fact that will has a sexual sense in Shakespeare's sonnets.

There are a lot of theories about Shakespeare.

I decided that if I want to write about a female hero in the 1920s, I'm going to have to give her all the advantages I can because she has serious disadvantages in being a woman. I wasn't going to have her cowed or overawed by class, so she had to be titled.

Nobody is surprised that women writers accurately represent male characters over and over again, no doubt because everybody knows that women understand men much better than vice-versa.

My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.

The funny thing with Ophelia is that I remembered her being this really cool, awesome female character when I read 'Hamlet' in high school, and when I went back and read it, no, she's not.

it is not the inferiority of women that has caused their historical insignificance; it is rather their historical insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority.

A literary woman's best critic is her husband.

A third...candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn't too dead to work.

I didn't want to be a boy, ever, but I was outraged that his height and intelligence were graces for him and gaucheries for me.

I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.

It is only men who are free, who create the inventions and intellectual works which to us moderns make life worth while.

Anais Nin shows an occasional grace in writing, but her work is quite foreign to me, precisely because she wants so much to be feminine and not feminist. And then she is so gaga before so many men. She talks about men I know in France, men who were less than nothing, and she considers them kings, extraordinary people.

The age, you know. A man can be wiser and wiser, and a woman is older and older.

Any strain upon a girl's intellect is to be dreaded, and any attempt to bring women into competition with men can scarcely escapefailure.

Some days you just want to get dressed and go about your business. But if you're a woman, you can't, because there is no unmarked woman.

And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.

Who has ever attempted to draw a line of separation between the duties of men and women, as moral beings, without committing the grossest inconsistencies on the one hand, or running into the most arrant absurdities on the other?

Pierre Curie, a brilliant scientist, happened to marry a still more brilliant one-Marie, the famous Madame Curie-and is the only great scientist in history who is consistently identified as the husband of someone else.

I've never felt grounded because of my ancestry or my gender. I think until women get away from that they're not going to be great writers.

There has to be this balance of reality for a woman. I don't want to play women who just serve a purpose for the script.

I think there are many feminists who would say that I am not a feminist. I love women, I have a lot of girlfriends, I admire them, they make so much more sense to me than men, and I feel like the world is a better place when women are in charge. So that kind of by default makes me a feminist. I love working in a female world.

You act like there are two kinds of girls,' she said. 'The smart ones and the ones that boys like.

A woman's biography - with about eight famous historical exceptions - so often turns out to be the story of a man and the woman who helped his career.