"The proper stuff of fiction' does not..." - Quote by Virginia Woolf

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”

“There'll be oceans of talk and emotions without end.”

“old emotions like old families have intermarried and have many connections.”

“The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'The Centaur' and 'Of the Farm'; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding.”

“What are the hallmarks of a competent writer of fiction? The first, it seems to me, is that he should be immensely interested in human beings, and have an eye sharp enough to see into them, and a hand clever enough to draw them as they are. The second is that he should be able to set them in imaginary situations which display the contents of their psyches effectively, and so carry his reader swiftly and pleasantly from point to point of what is called a good story.”

“I am all the time thinking about poetry and fiction and you.”

“I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.”

“Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now.”

“What I try to do with any of my stories, any of my novels, is make them feel very original.”