Top 100 Quotes About Virginia Woolf
#1. If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
Alan Bennett
#2. I think the kind of unexpected I really love is when you open books and the actual way of writing is different and interesting. Like reading Virginia Woolf for the first time or Lawrence Durrell for the first time.
Lalla Ward
#3. 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' is, to my mind, a work of perfect genius.
Amity Gaige
#4. Virginia Woolf's writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.
Edith Sitwell
#5. Frank Morley, who had worked in London at Faber and Faber, was the new head of Harcourt Brace, and he hired me to start in 1940. The early years at Harcourt were wonderful. Almost my first assignment was Virginia Woolf's novel 'Between the Acts.'
Robert Giroux
#6. An otherwise happily married couple may turn a mixed doubles game into a scene from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
Rod Laver
#7. I skim through our notebook, thick with words, and then through our Facebook messages - so many now - and then I write a new one, quoting Virginia Woolf: Let us wander whirling to the gilt chairs. ... Are we not acceptable, moon? Are we not lovely sitting together here ... ?
Jennifer Niven
#8. The greatest texts, I think, first dazzle, then with careful rereading, they instruct. I have learned from Virginia Woolf more than I even know how to articulate.
Lauren Groff
#9. At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year.
Ian McEwan
#10. Katherine, who tried so hard in London to be best friends with Virginia Woolf, who hated her, because Katherine was the kind of naif-imbecile that the literary men adored and championed at her expense.
Chris Kraus
#12. Virginia Woolf had to ask herself How can one weigh and shape dialogue till each sentence tears the shingles in the bottom of the reader's soul?
Virginia Woolf
#13. In school, I was Martha in 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' I loved that.
Cara Delevingne
#14. I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I'd hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy.
Anne Lamott
#15. My earliest experience was reading Edward Albee's 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' at 8, you know, with a bunch of kids on my steps - on the stoops - and knowing that I wanted to direct them saying the lines. I don't really know how to articulate that 'cause there wasn't someone to show me.
Lee Daniels
#16. Was it Brigid Brophy who gave up on a certain Virginia Woolf novel when she discovered that Woolf believed one needed a corkscrew to open a bottle of champagne?
David Markson
#17. I fell in love with Virginia Woolf in college. I especially admire how well she writes about daily life, how she captures so much meaning and consequence in the smallest details of a day.
Karen Thompson Walker
#18. He was sceptical about the value of almost all work, save for the pleasure it gives the worker,' reported Virginia Woolf. 'He works only because he likes it.
Richard Davenport-Hines
#19. Virginia Woolf was wrong. You do not need a room of your own to write.
Julia Glass
#20. I think throughout the 20th century, for some reason, serious writers increasingly had contempt for the average reader. You can really see this in the letters of such people as Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
Michel Faber
#21. There is something so hopeful about a diary, a journal, a new notebook, which Joan Didion and Virginia Woolf both wrote about. A blog. Perhaps we all are waiting for someone to discover us.
Lily Koppel
#22. The day Mother Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? killed Father The Outlaw Josey Wales, they were arguing again about the Pre-Reddening game of Major League Baseball.
Nick DiChario
#23. My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.
Joyce Carol Oates
#24. [On Virginia Woolf] Craving to be set free from her egomania by something or someone stronger and altogether dissimilar from herself, she speculated endlessly upon the unknown: and for her the unknown was frequently the commonplace.
Michael Holroyd
#25. Like all her friends, I miss her greatly ... But ... I am sure there is no case for lamentation ... Virginia Woolf got through an immense amount of work, she gave acute pleasure in new ways, she pushed the light of the English language a little further against darkness. Those are facts.
E. M. Forster
#26. It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh ... Robert Schumann has been mentioned ... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath ... some of them with rather grim ends.
Stephen Fry
#27. Virginia Woolf came along in the early part of the century and essentially said through her writing, yes, big books can be written about the traditional big subjects. There is war. There is the search for God. These are all very important things.
Michael Cunningham
#28. It's hard sometimes to see through the fog, the pain, hurt, fear and everything else we live with every day. Virginia Woolf couldn't do it. Annette Klinger couldn't, either. My heart breaks for them - that they couldn't get the help they needed for a disease they couldn't control.
Nyrae Dawn
#29. In "Virginia Woolf" I had a thing which the grips called the paraplegic which was a wheelchair thing that I had made up years before where I could stand on this bicycle-like device and be pushed down the hall, and then step off it with a handheld camera.
Haskell Wexler
#30. Vita Sackville-West is one of my favorite female icons. She was a writer and a prolific gardener, but she also had a relationship with Virginia Woolf, and she was married to Sir Harold Nicolson. She was a woman who lived outside of norms.
Gwendoline Christie
#31. She was so far absorbed in this work, for it was really difficult to find how all these sounds should stand together, and drew upon the whole of her faculties, that she never heard a knock at the door. ~Virginia Woolf
Nicole Arlyn
#32. I like reading ... French, Russian classics - Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert. I also like Hemingway, Virginia Woolf.
Andrea Bocelli
#33. I have never read Sylvia Plath. My mother has never read Virginia Woolf. In general, we have stayed out of one another's way like this.
Alison Bechdel
#34. Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's afraid of the big bad wolf ... who's afraid of living life without false illusions.
Edward Albee
#35. When I saw Virginia Woolf, somewhere between the first and second acts, someone I had known as my mother became somebody else.
Kiefer Sutherland
#36. I love reading other people's diaries, especially someone like Virginia Woolf's - such a formidable woman that it's a revelation when she shows you a more vulnerable side of herself.
Michael Palin
#37. All feeling has an equivalent in action or is useless"
"Did you say that?"
Of course not," she says. "Virginia Woolf
Estelle Laure
#38. When you think about Broadway, you think broad and big, but the fact is there are so many plays that are very intimate, but fill a 1,500-seat house. Plays like 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' have deep moments of silence and intimacy to them.
Steve Kazee
#39. Right now she is reading Virginia Woolf, all of Virginia Woolf, book by book-She is fascinated by the idea of a woman like that, a woman of such brilliance, such strangeness, such immeasurable sorrow; a woman who had genius but still filled her pocket with a stone and waded out into a river.
Michael Cunningham
#40. Who was it who said that every virtue contains its corresponding vice? C.S. Lewis? Virginia Woolf? You forget. But it has always worried you that what the virtue of wit contained was the vice of scorn.
Kevin Brockmeier
#41. To pursue the thing she needed to do, Virginia Woolf wrote, "a woman must have money and a room of her own ... " I needed money and a backpack.
Elisabeth Eaves
#42. TYPICAL TROLOLOL: "Sure, but even Virginia Woolf said in A Room of One's Own that 'a woman must have money,' so obviously all girls are just out for cash.
Sam Maggs
#43. Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I'm finishing, even if it's turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don't admit it, they're not being honest.
Michael Cunningham
#44. If you're writing an opinion piece, it's your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions.
David Mamet
#45. Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old.
Michael Cunningham
#46. Leonard Woolf: If I didn't know you better I'd call this ingratitude.
Virginia Woolf: I am ungrateful? You call ME ungrateful? My life has been stolen from me. I'm living in a town I have no wish to live in... I'm living a life I have no wish to live... How did this happen?
Virginia Woolf
#47. Something radically new, the producer tells me. Think Virginia Woolf with dead bodies and car chases.
James Sallis
#48. No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Hemingway's postwar novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war.
J.G. Ballard
#49. Virginia Woolf, I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her 'a beautiful little knitter.
Edith Sitwell
#50. I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for Virginia Woolf to make up her novels
Rebecca Solnit
#51. Of Virginia Woolf: The talent of this generation which is most certain of survival.
Rebecca West
#52. I grew up in a small town, in a small community, and I would not have had access to great plays when I was a kid were it not for the films of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' and 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.'
Tracy Letts
#53. She pulled off Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and settled down in a comfortable leather chair by the fire to read.
Lucinda Riley
#54. The closest he comes to explaining why he found it gay is to say that like "Virginia Woolf", it showed a woman defeating a man. Presumably a straight man could never imagine such a thing.
Christopher Bram
#55. I was influenced by big, strong voices - writers like Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Jane Bowles; gay writers like Ed White, Michael Cunningham, Allen Hollinghurst; and contemporary lesbian writers, like Dorothy Allison.
Stacey D'Erasmo
#56. Virginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I'll go a step further. You must be bisexual.
Rita Mae Brown
#57. Every secret of a writers soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works - Virginia Woolf
Tracie Podger
#58. It may be that Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf were sitting around fretting about their Amazon reviews or their pre-pub whatever, but I kind of doubt it. I don't think that's how the work probably got made.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#59. Her soul rusted with that grievance sticking in it
Virginia Woolf
#60. Could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world. It
Virginia Woolf
#61. Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.
Virginia Woolf
#62. Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.
Virginia Woolf
#63. The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.
Virginia Woolf
#64. He would look over the edge of the sofa down into the sea.
Virginia Woolf
#65. [Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
Virginia Woolf
#68. Freedom and fullness of expression are of the essence of the art.
Virginia Woolf
#69. You can't think how I depend on you, and when you're not there the colour goes out of my life.
Virginia Woolf
#70. Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.
Virginia Woolf
#71. The summer is put away folded up in the drawer with other summers.
Virginia Woolf
#72. Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.
Virginia Woolf
#74. So, when there is a strife of tongues, at some meeting, the chairman, to obtain unity, suggests that every one shall speak in French. Perhaps it is bad French; French may not contain the words that express the speaker's thoughts; nevertheless speaking French imposes some order, some uniformity.
Virginia Woolf
#75. Once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody.
Virginia Woolf
#77. But who, save the nerve-worn and sleepless, or thinkers standing with hands to the eyes on some crag above the multitude, see things thus in skeleton outline, bare of flesh?
Virginia Woolf
#78. But when she looked at Prue tonight, she saw this was not now quite true of her. She was just beginning, just moving, just descending.
Virginia Woolf
#79. Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.
Virginia Woolf
#80. A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her.
Virginia Woolf
#81. My mind is so impatient, so quick, in some ways so desperate.
Virginia Woolf
#82. It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals.
Virginia Woolf
#83. Roses," she thought sardonically, "All trash, m'dear.
Virginia Woolf
#84. It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for.
Virginia Woolf
#85. There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.
Virginia Woolf
#86. They became part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen through the eyes of love
Virginia Woolf
#87. It is strange that we, who are capable of so much suffering, should inflict so much suffering.
Virginia Woolf
#88. It is so vast an alleviation to be able to point for another to look at. And then not to talk. To follow the dark paths of the mind and enter the past, to visit books, to brush aside their branches and break off some fruit.
Virginia Woolf
#89. As for himself, when he went to go to a party, as one was sometimes obliged to, from a wish not to give offence, he walked into the middle of the room, said 'Ha! Ha!' as loud as ever he could, considered he had done his duty, and went home.
Virginia Woolf
#90. Here am I shedding one of my life-skins and all they will say is, 'Bernard is spending ten days in Rome'.
Virginia Woolf
#91. But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.
Virginia Woolf
#92. I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it.
Virginia Woolf
#93. About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.
Virginia Woolf
#94. One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man
Virginia Woolf
#95. Clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.
Virginia Woolf
#96. Like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life.
Virginia Woolf
#97. This core of darkness could go anywhere, for no one saw it.
Virginia Woolf
#98. The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme
thinking too much.
Virginia Woolf
#99. And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.
Virginia Woolf
#100. Most of a modest woman's life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every year, was made obvious.
Virginia Woolf
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
