Woolf Quotes - Page 2

• Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title. - Virginia Woolf, from Jacob's Room Television is chewing gum for the eyes.

  Frank Lloyd Wright

  Book, Heart, Eye

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• 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

  Live Life, Mean, Virginia

  Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin (1988). “Conversations with Edward Albee”, p.52, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• In other words, [ H.P. Lovecraft] was areligious, asexual, neurasthenic, he just didn't want to react to the world. Like Virginia Woolf, who considered religion the ultimate obscenity.

  Paul Laffoley

  Virginia, Want, World

  Source: www.paranoiamagazine.com

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• At Princeton I wrote my junior paper on Virginia Woolf, and for my senior thesis I wrote on Samuel Beckett. I wrote some about "Between the Acts" and "Mrs. Dalloway'' but mostly about "To the Lighthouse." With Beckett I focused, perversely, on his novels, "Molloy," "Malone Dies," and "The Unnamable." That's when I decided I should never write again.

  David Duchovny

  Senior, Writing, Virginia

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• 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

  Writing, College, Virginia

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• 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

  Hate, Virginia, San Francisco

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• 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

  Jobs, Writing, Political Opinions

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• I've always loved my own little office spaces no matter what they were like. It's the Virginia Woolf, room of one's own concept, it's really important.

  Lena Dunham

  Office Space, Virginia, Important

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• 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

  Men, Thinking, Virginia

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• She pulled off Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and settled down in a comfortable leather chair by the fire to read.

  Lucinda Riley

  Fire, Virginia, Lighthouse

  Lucinda Riley (2012). “The Orchid House: A Novel”, p.74, Simon and Schuster

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• As an actor, to go and see those shows - great plays like 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' and Clifford Odets's 'Golden Boy' - it's so exhilarating. I'd personally love to perform the role of Jerry in Edward Albee's 'The Zoo Story.' He's a transient, lost soul, and an example of humanity at its rawest.

  Keegan Allen

  Zoos, Boys, Play

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• Leonard Woolf in a letter to Lytton Strachey said he hated John Maynard Keynes "for his crass stupidity and hideous face".

  Leonard Woolf

  Stupidity, Letters, Faces

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• 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

  Thinking, Virginia, Play

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• 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

  Book, School, Virginia

  "The Pulitzer for Fiction". "PBS NewsHour" with Elizabeth Farnsworth, www.pbs.org. April 19, 1999.

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• 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

  Hero, Thinking, Virginia

  "Michael Cunningham: A life in writing" by Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. February 7, 2011.

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• Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: "I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going.

  Virginia Woolf

  Party, Virginia, Two

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• I usually have more than one thing I'm working on at once -- I've been working on three different novels. When I get stuck on one, I hop back and forth. It's sort of freeing: I can say I'm abandoning this thing that I hate forever and I'm moving on to something that's good. I'll find that I'll go back to [the other project] in a day or a week and like it again. But that moment of wanting to trash something -- that Virginia Woolf moment when you have to be stopped from filling your pocket with stones -- comes pretty regularly for me. Switching is probably a good thing.

  Dan Chaon

  Hate, Moving, Virginia

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• An otherwise happily married couple may turn a mixed doubles game into a scene from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

  Rod Laver

  Couple, Virginia, Games

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• At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year.

  Ian Mcewan

  Virginia, Years, Risk

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• I like reading... French, Russian classics - Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert. I also like Hemingway, Virginia Woolf.

  Andrea Bocelli

  Reading, Virginia, Dostoyevsky

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• My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Virginia, Role Models, Roles

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Of Virginia Woolf: The talent of this generation which is most certain of survival.

  Rebecca West

  Virginia, Survival, This Generation

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• Woolf wanted to say dangerous things in Orlando but she did not want to say them in the missionary position.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Want, Orlando, Missionary

  Jeanette Winterson (2013). “Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery”, p.49, Random House

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• 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

  Virginia, Vices, Forget

  Kevin Brockmeier (2008). “The View from the Seventh Layer: Stories”, p.101, Vintage

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• It's impossible to read a distinctive stylist like Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Woolf, James - and many more - without wanting to write, however entirely different one's writing will be.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Writing, Different, Stylist

  "Writing Lessons From the Madly Prolific Joyce Carol Oates". Interview with Alexander Sammon, www.motherjones.com. September 10, 2016.

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