All Quotes

"Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money."

"Of the modern writers, Virginia Woolf is one who consistently attempted to place women at the center of her thinking. But she did not do it with the bold and inclusive sweep of Sappho. She did it awkwardly and with apology, with a tone of self-deprecation. This is apparent, for example, in A Room of One's Own, in its style and tone and in its apparent random "female" ambience of thought hither and yon, an innovation to mask the real power of her intellect."

"Writing is also a profession, and, at its best, an honourable one. It has been made honourable by those who have already been members of it. Whether you like it or not, every time you set pen to paper you’re staring at the same blank space that confronted Milton, Melville, Emily Bronte, Dostoevsky and George Eliot, George Orwell and William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams, not to mention the latest hero, Gabriel Garcia Marquez."

"I am tired of hearing Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson held up as the matriarchs of feminist and/or women's literature. Woolf was a racist, Dickinson was a woman of privilege who never left her house, nor had to deal with issues beyond which white dress to wear on a given day. Race and class have yet to be addressed, or if they are discussed, it is on their terms not ours"

"I now think tragedy is not foul deeds done to a person (usually noble in some manner) but rather that tragedy is irresolvable conflict. Both sides/ideas are right. Plot involves fragmentary reality, and it might involve composite reality. Fragmentary reality is the view of the individual. Composite reality is the community or state view. Fragmentary reality is always set against composite reality. Virginia Woolf did this by creating fragmentary monologues and for a while this was all the rage in literature. She was a genius. In the hands of the merely talented it came off like gibberish."

"I cannot say I am a citizen of the world as Virginia Woolf, speaking as an Anglo woman born to economic means, declared herself; nor can I make the same claim to U.S. citizenship as Adrienne Rich does despite her universal feeling for humanity. As a mestiza born to the lower strata, I am treated at best, as a second class citizen, at worst, as a non-entity. I am commonly perceived as a foreigner everywhere I go, including in the United States and in Mexico. This international perception is based on my color and features. I am neither black nor white. I am not light skinned and cannot be mistaken for "white"; because my hair is so straight I cannot be mistaken for "black." And by U.S..standards and according to some North American Native Americans, I cannot make official claims to being india."

"I don't think we read George Eliot, [Jane Austen]], Virginia Woolf, or Flannery O'Connor as "women writers" anymore, but as vital voices of their time. I know that, for instance, Toni Morrison will be read in this fashion. She is already. The point we're striving for is one at which the criteria for the work is its worth to readers, its excellence, the qualities that shine out and endure."

"Not surprisingly, a valorization of the body has been present in nearly all the literature of "second wave" 20th-century feminism, as it has characterized the literature produced by the anti-colonial revolt and by the descendants of the enslaved Africans. On this ground, across great geographic and cultural boundaries, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) anticipates Aimé Cesaire's Return to the Native Land (1938), when she mockingly scolds her female audience and, behind it, a broader female world, for not having managed to produce anything but children."

"I would like to have written Orlando (laughs). But I'm very far from that!"

"[S]ome economic awareness may even be a prerequisite to the full appreciation of [some] books, plays, and operas. Virginia Woolf's Orlando must be quite bewildering to the economically ignorant."

"Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area. Virginia Woolf did this incomparably. And the complexity of her human relationships, the economy with which she managed to portray them... staggering…(Was Woolf a big influence when you began writing?) NG: Midway, I think-after I'd been writing for about five years. She can be a very dangerous influence on a young writer. It's easy to fall into the cadence. But the content isn't there..."

"Her genius was intensely feminine and personal—private almost. To read one of her books was (if you liked it) to receive a letter from her, addressed specially to you."

"...on race, as on so much else, Virginia was not a typical white European feminist, but stood against much of what that sector of women has come to stand for. Virginia Woolf wanted the military budget for women. She made the case for middle-class women. She said it should come to women as wages for the housework we did; that that was a better way to spend the money. I can't see an argument against it. In Three Guineas, the only extensive nonfiction book she ever wrote, she made this central. But the case she makes for wages for housework, spelled out most brilliantly in this extraordinary book, seems not to interest - may even be censored out by - her admirers...I think Virginia can be tremendously useful to us, to all of us, women of color, Third World women, white women, and men on our side, because she gives us the strength to demand more of what we're entitled to. And the strength also to refuse to replicate or allow other women to replicate what we have been attacking men for doing and being."

"Nothing is more destructive of the spirit and ultimately of creativity than false meekness, anger that does not know its own name. And nothing is more freeing for a woman (or for a woman writer) than giving up the pleasures of masochism and beginning to fight. But we must always remember that fighting is only a first step. As Virginia Woolf points out in A Room of One's Own, many women's books have been destroyed by the rage and bitterness at their own centers. Rage opens the doors into the spirit, but then the spirit must be nurtureed."

"How begin to describe the permission Woolf’s feminism and artistry bestowed on the hopeful beginner? For me, her work, which never panders, was a reliable antidote to literary men’s scorn or disregard. Her novels demonstrated that despised domesticity, including dinner parties and shopping, could be transformed into unrivaled art."

"As women readers have articulated not just separate taste, a separate list of best-sellers, favorites, but also a developing network we can call culture, Woolf's role in this culture has become clearer, more obviously key. She wrote about textured lives, the secret currents between women, towards each other, against men, even against each other, but always with a piercing consciousness of sexual conflict. Many of us have imitated/will imitate Woolf to discover what she has to offer in the way of style and vision. And since so many women read and use Woolf, her work becomes familiar, "easier.""

"I know that Virginia Woolf's entire literary project was to find the space, the frozen moment in time, where the individual might matter, because whenever time, that is to say, history intervened, the individual was lost....And Virginia Woolf went mad the last time and killed herself at least partly because it was another war, and who could bear such a thing?"

"Rita Giacoman is the first hardcore Palestinian feminist we meet. She cites Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, speaks of the deep need to degender education for the young. She's in contact with Israeli feminists, and she comments-quite Woolflike-"Feminists-both Israeli and Palestinian-interpret movement not in nationalist terms, but in terms of cooperation.""

"Reading Virginia Woolf's Orlando was an event... it's all right to make your man turn into a woman, it's all right to have a century of time flow by here and a moment of time flow by there. She showed me various freedoms I could take in writing."

"When I read Virginia Woolf's Orlando or William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain, I can feel like I'm dying, or I'm stuck, both in life and in work. I read those books, and then I start flowing again. I'm happy that I can do that for other people."

"There's a life force that's in Orlando. There's a light shining from that book. When I feel discouraged, I can pick it up and read a paragraph and feel up again. Woolf covers four hundred years of history, and one person lives for four hundred years. And I thought, "Yeah, I can treat time like that." The way Virginia Woolf uses time makes sense to me. And frees me, too. If I want a character to live to a hundred and twenty so that he can live many connecting experiences, so that he can go from one part of history to another, then I just go ahead and do it. We don't know exactly how old my grandmother is, my mother and my father are, because they have all these fake papers and stories, and so I just went ahead and gave them long lives and didn't worry about their ages. Orlando gave me permission to make them as old as they needed to be."

"("you wouldn't agree with Virginia Woolf that there is such a thing as a woman's prose style?") I don't know. I am not going to disagree with Virginia Woolf about anything. I see her style, which is wonderful. Now there's the kind of complexity that I envy with my whole heart, that kind of weaving. But is there anybody besides Virginia Woolf who can do that particular sort of thing? You see, that way of thinking slides so easily into a sort of sexism that it worries me a little bit."

"("Has feminism affected your self-concept?") Yes, it's given me more confidence to be a woman. It has helped women be women and not just reflections of men, particularly, as Virginia Woolf said, "magnifying reflections" of men."

"The incredible upsurge of woman writers and poets in the 1980s is a sign that women are finding their voices. They're beginning to talk about their experiences without using a male vocabulary or meeting male expectations. It's sticky, because the language is so male-centered that it excludes much of the feminine experience. Sex, for instance, is always described from a male point of view, as penetration, insemination, and so on. A lot of women still deny that their experience is different than a man's. They do this because it's scary to realize you don't have the words to describe your own experience. The few words we do have we get from our mothers and the women who taught us when we were young. Virginia Woolf says, "We think back through our mothers.""

"if your storyteller's Virginia Woolf, you've hit a pretty high-level society."

"as feminist theory began to finally get into my head, and as I began to read what the feminists told me to read, which was my female ancestors in writing-I had always read George Eliot, Willa Cather, and so on, certain writers, and of course Virginia Woolf. I had read Virginia Woolf for years, but as I began to understand what she was trying to say, I was reeducated, it really was true. And I think, I'm so grateful to Woolf and all the rest of them because I think I would not have been able to go on writing, that this pretending to be a man all the time, it was beginning not to work. I'm not a man, but I didn't know what was wrong. I didn't know what this sort of discomfort and feeling of frustration was, and I had to learn how to write as a woman, and there's no doubt about that, and I had to fight a lot of my own training and prejudices."

"I think Virginia Woolf is probably the person whose technical daring and her skill at doing that kind of thing and moving from one head to another head, from one point of view to another, in the years and in the ways, is the most admirable. Nobody has written anything like that that I know. I was fascinated by what she did. She was doing something new in story telling, something new in the novel, by that moving point of view. The nineteenth-century novel does it too, of course, in a very different way."

"Virginia Woolf... it's taken us fifty or sixty years to figure out what she was doing in her novels. We are just beginning to get some good Virginia Woolf criticism, because she was way ahead of her time. Everyone said James Joyce is it. OK, he was it for then, but to me Virginia Woolf is still it, while Joyce is an interesting phenomenon historically. Woolf is still a writer who took risks that we don't even know how to explain. It's a matter of rereading, learning to read, and seeing what is there, instead of what "ought to be there.""

"I don't like Virginia Woolf that much...I'm interested in Virginia Woolf, the critic. All the texts in The Common Reader are wonders of precision, of humor, of intelligence, but I'm a little afraid at times of certain lyrical aspects of her fiction. It seems as if she gets a little carried away. I wish there were a little more of Jane Austen in Virginia Woolf. But the essays, all of them, interest me."

"It is also possible to use fictitious characters to highlight an absence, as Virginia Woolf does in A Room of One's Own when she speaks of Shakespeare's talented and fictitious sister, for whom no opportunities were open. I wrote a similar piece about the invented sister of a Spanish chronicler who visited Puerto Rico in the 18th century to make visible the absence of women chroniclers."

"There's been some change, as is evident by the number of women writers who are read. And education itself has somewhat changed. There's a lot more encouragement, a lot more writing classes. It was the women's movement that gave women in academe a certain strength. If you'd look at the old reading lists, maybe George Eliot, the Bront‘s, Virginia Woolf might be taught. At Stanford, I think it was 1971, they needed somebody [to teach their first-ever course on women's literature], and my name was suggested. Well, I had no credentials. I had never gone to college. And there was quite a to-do about whether or not I had the qualifications. It was supposed to be a small class. I went into this auditorium. It was jammed. There were, I think, four guys, one of whom went out and then came back again and then went out and then came back again. There were over 100 women there, including faculty wives. By and large, none of this had ever been taught at Stanford before."

"(What women writers, contemporary or historical, well-known or obscure, do you count among your most important literary influences? And is anxiety of influence a notion that applies equally to women writers?) AO: I could name dozens, but here are a few:...Among prose writers, Virginia Woolf above all."

"Our thinking does tend to be dominated—colonized, you might say—by the history of patriarchal thought and language, but it is still possible to think independently if you make up your mind to do it and be vigilant. Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own promises that “if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think,” we might change the world."

"In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf satirically describes her perplexity at the bulging card catalog of the British Museum: why, she asks, are there so many books written by men about women but none by women about men? The answer to her question is that from the beginning of time men have been struggling with the threat of woman's dominance."

"Woolf meant something to me. Mrs. Dalloway, I remember, was the first thing I read. I loved the style; I was very interested in the style"

"In rereading Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" (1929) for the first time in some years, I was astonished at the sense of effort, of pains taken, of dogged tentativeness, in the tone of that essay. And I recognized that tone. I had heard it often enough, in myself and in other women. It is the tone of a woman almost in touch with her anger, who is determined not to appear angry, who is willing herself to be calm, detached, and even charming in a roomful of men where things have been said which are attacks on her very integrity. Virginia Woolf is addressing an audience of women, but she is acutely conscious-as she always was-of being overheard by men: by Morgan and Lytton and Maynard Keynes and for that matter by her father, Leslie Stephen. She drew the language out into an exacerbated thread in her determination to have her own sensibility yet protect it from those masculine presences. Only at rare moments in that essay do you hear the passion in her voice; she was trying to sound as cool as Jane Austen, as Olympian as Shakespeare, because that is the way the men of the culture thought a writer should sound."

"Comparing Jane Eyre to Wuthering Heights, as people tend to do, Virginia Woolf had this to say: "The drawbacks of being Jane Eyre are not far to seek. Always to be a governess and always to be in love is a serious limitation in a world which is full, after all, of people who are neither one nor the other.... [Charlotte Brontë] does not attempt to solve the problems of human life; she is even unaware that such problems exist; all her force, which is the more tremendous for being constricted, goes into the assertion, "I love," "I hate," "I suffer"...She goes on to state that Emily Brontë is a greater poet than Charlotte because "there is no 'I' in Wuthering Heights. There are no governesses. There are no employers. There is love, but not the love of men and women." In short, and here I would agree with her, Wuthering Heights is mythic."

"Virginia Woolf is referenced in this book again and again, both for her work and for her tragic life, which, I suppose, are one and the same...None of my books could have been written without these extraordinary authors."

"I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her 'a beautiful little knitter'."

"The novel, of course, was never to be the same after the day she started work on it. As novel succeeded novel she proceeded to break, in turn, each mold of her own."

"What is extraordinary is that the hostility the [Bloomsbury] group originally provoked is still with us and is often expressed with the violence of first discovery. In a recent New Statesman review, for example, the English critic John Carey quotes one of Virginia Woolf's snobbish remarks about the lower classes and concludes: "Maybe she was right to make away with herself and leave the landscape clean.""

"What an excellent horse do they lose, for want of address and boldness to manage him! ... I could manage this horse better than others do."

"Know ye not that the end and object of conquest is to avoid doing the same thing as the conquered?"

"Holy shadows of the dead, I'm not to blame for your cruel and bitter fate, but the accursed rivalry which brought sister nations and brother people, to fight one another. I do not feel happy for this victory of mine. On the contrary, I would be glad, brothers, if I had all of you standing here next to me, since we are united by the same language, the same blood and the same visions."

"If I were not Alexander, I should wish to be Diogenes."

"I do not steal victory."

"If it were not my purpose to combine barbarian things with things Hellenic, to traverse and civilize every continent, to search out the uttermost parts of land and sea, to push the bounds of Macedonia to the farthest Ocean, and to disseminate and shower the blessings of the Hellenic justice and peace over every nation, I should not be content to sit quietly in the luxury of idle power, but I should emulate the frugality of Diogenes. But as things are, forgive me Diogenes, that I imitate Herakles, and emulate Perseus, and follow in the footsteps of Dionysos, the divine author and progenitor of my family, and desire that victorious Hellenes should dance again in India and revive the memory of the Bacchic revels among the savage mountain tribes beyond the Kaukasos..."

"Our enemies are Medes and Persians, men who for centuries have lived soft and luxurious lives; we of Macedon for generations past have been trained in the hard school of danger and war. Above all, we are free men, and they are slaves. There are Greek troops, to be sure, in Persian service — but how different is their cause from ours! They will be fighting for pay — and not much of at that; we, on the contrary, shall fight for Greece, and our hearts will be in it. As for our foreign troops — Thracians, Paeonians, Illyrians, Agrianes — they are the best and stoutest soldiers in Europe, and they will find as their opponents the slackest and softest of the tribes of Asia. And what, finally, of the two men in supreme command? You have Alexander, they — Darius!"

"Your ancestors came to Macedonia and the rest of Hellas [Greece] and did us great harm, though we had done them no prior injury. I have been appointed leader of the Greeks, and wanting to punish the Persians I have come to Asia, which I took from you."

"So would I, if I were Parmenion."