Virginia Woolf Quotes

I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

Bad literature is a form of treason.

A text may be superbly written, exquisitely subtle, deeply meaningful, but still seem like a luxury extra, something we add to the already well-stocked store of our reading experience.

I remember, the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never plotted out a line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand.

Alec Wilkinson is a spare, clear, and lucid writer who works in stylistic simplicity with material that is not simple at all.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another and that everything which occurs to them is worth putting down.

I used to be more of a purist about literature. I thought, 'If it's a really propulsive story, then maybe there's something unliterary about it.'

The art of newspaper paragraphing is to stroke a platitude until it purrs like an epigram.

You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

Good writing does not come from verbiage but from words.

The way I was educated, maybe from just inhaling something in the air back then, I grew up believing that E. B. White occupied the apex of essay writing.

In truth, even if they have an imperfect insight into their own methods, I still slightly mistrust writers of fiction who are assured literary critics; it makes me suspect that they favour the word over the world it should describe. Such scribes fall victim too easily to the solecism of equating style with morality.

Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation; it doesn't require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice.

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing - if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.

In prose, I think you sometimes have to write in very plain language, where every line may not seem to be so important, though in all writing every line is important.

One mistake with beginners in writing is, that they think it important to spin out something long. It is a great deal better not to write more than a page or two, unless you have something to say, and can write it correctly.

Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.

The only books I give up on are texts where the writer's attention is concentrated so heavily on narrative questions that his or her use of language becomes careless.

It's hard to judge literary merit.

There's no literary merit in my books.

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

People don't read me and say, 'Oh, it's so clean and elegant.'

Not a word that I have written about Yugoslavia is denounceable, not a single one. It is literature.