Virginia Woolf Quotes

For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz.

Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words.

Music is the soul of language.

Some people like to paint trees. I like to paint love. I find it more meaningful than painting trees.

I spend a lot of time writing. I get inspiration from texts rather than images.

One of the pleasant things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come.

Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.

Creativity was definitely a big part of our household, and I remember always writing stories and being encouraged to be creative.

When people ask me for secrets to writing, I say, 'Read to write.'

Art is great. At its best, it engages the intellect and challenges the spirit; it connects us across history and reminds us of our humanity.

Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.

I'm a bit like a sponge. When I'm not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little - and out comes, not water but ink.

Without the word dream, or the concept dream, and without the word blue and the emotions, I would have been really limited in the things I've written and performed.

People get inspired to write, paint, draw, sing, sculpt, dance in many different ways. And there are many types of art. But the one thing that they all have in common is that they are all a sort of magic. Sometimes the magic flows from one’s fingers, other times it is transferred to the person who experiences the result. Magic has always worked in mysterious ways.

A work of art is one of mystery, the one extreme magic; everything else is either arithmetic or biology.

Joy is a part of my process. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that poetry, as a practice, necessitates a sense of joy. It's exhilarating to come into contact with the things we write into being. And a real sense of play and abandon – even when we are relying on hard-won technique, and even when the aim is deadly serious. How often do we get the excuse to stop, think, and then stop thinking altogether and try to listen to what sits behind our outside of our thoughts? Poets are lucky.

I don't think there's really any difference between art - or writing, or music - and magic. And I particularly draw the link between magic and writing. I think that they are profoundly connected.

As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.

In the world of words the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

It's not something you can find. There's a moment you arrive at --- there's no words for it. A bunch of people come together at this place where a note hits your heart and your brain tells your finger where to go. It's an otherworldly thing, like when a painter gets the right combination of colors together.

Part of my function as a writer is to dream awake. And that usually happens. If I sit down to write in the morning, in the beginning of that writing session and the ending of that session, I'm aware that I'm writing. I'm aware of my surroundings. It's like shallow sleep on both ends, when you go to bed and when you wake up. But in the middle, the world is gone and I'm able to see better.

For Poesy alone can tell her dreams, With the fine spell of words alone can save Imagination from the sable charm And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say, ‘Thou art no Poet may’st not tell thy dreams?’ Since every man whose soul is not a clod Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved And been well nurtured in his mother tongue. Whether the dream now purpos’d to rehearse Be poet’s or fanatic’s will be known When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.

The best writing is certainly when you are in love

A picture can say 1000 words but it can also inspire you to write 1000 more.

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat... where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.