Virginia Woolf Quotes

But I'm aware of the fact that I'm working in a commercial venue where I'm producing something that I wouldn't normally be approaching the way I'm doing it.

Sometimes when you do big movies, you can lose sometimes a little bit of soul.

I don't want the world to give me anything for my books except money enough to save me from the temptation to write only for money.

Nothing can injure a man's writing if he's a first-rate writer. If a man is not a first-rate writer, there's not anything can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not first rate because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool.

When I'm writing, I really want to satisfy myself. I've got a story that I am working on and struggling with, and I want to tell it the most effective way I can. That's really what I struggle with. And the thought of who may be reading it may be there somewhere in the back of my mind - I'll never say it's not there because I don't know - but it's not really what I'm thinking about.

You have to understand, writing a novel gets very weird and invisible-friend-from-childhood-ish. Then you kill that thing, which was never really alive except in your imagination, and you're supposed to go buy groceries and talk to people at parties and stuff.

Rumors sound of galleries asking artists for up-sized art and more of it... Everything winds up set to maximum in order to feed the beast. Bigness is not all bad. There's something pleasing about large, well-lit spaces. But the bigness has also led to a narrowing of sensibilities, by making it very hard for any but the glitziest works to get traction.

I don’t think any man writing can worry about what the act of writing costs him, even though at times he is very aware of it.

If you want to be a serious writer, then you have to write what there is to write about. If you're going to pull your punches and second-guess yourself and not do things because you're worried, then don't write. Stay home and do something else.

A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. ... A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy: true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.

On "Tonight" I think I was torn dreadfully between writing what I wanted to write, but keeping it in a style that would follow up what I had just done. That's where I feel I was untrue to myself as an artist . . . that album and, to a lesser extent, "Never Let Me Down."

How few writers can prostitute all their powers!

It's easy to write something average or even something good. But writing well is quite challenging.

A good day's writing, when I turn off my computer after I know that I've written okay, or as well as I can write, that's a day well spent.

All I've tried to do as an actor is follow the good writing. That's been my main drive. It's not always possible, so when you do come upon it, like when I came upon this, you realize pretty quickly this is something you need to be involved with.

Obviously there's something very seductive about movies, which can be attractive in a bad way if you're doing them for the wrong reasons — for money, or for fame. I hope I won't ever do that. I don't feel at home in L.A., I feel like I'm on holiday. It's nice to dip your feet in occasionally, but I think it's probably quite unhealthy to spend too much time there at once.

What other people think of me is not really my major concern in life. What other people think of what I write is another matter.

I write a song because I want to. I think the moment you start writing it to make money, you're starting to kill yourself artistically.

Everybody wants to write a hit song, but in Nashville people want to write the best song, which was my original intention as a singer/songwriter. ... I left because I could no longer make records that sounded less and less like me. I tried to please people instead of believing in my own strength, until the only thing I could do was walk away.

A poet cannot be a Party member ... without paying the price.

A writer doesn't write for his readers, does he? Yet he has to take elementary precautions all the same, to make them comfortable.

One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either.

Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.

It's rare that a good writer will sit down and write a good script. Writers are greedy too, and they don't want to work without getting paid. But quality will find its way out.

I've seen an awful lot of plays that I'd read before they were put into production and been shocked by what's happened to them. In the attempt to make them straightforward and commercially successful, a lot of things go out the window.