A Quote by Alan Bennett
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.
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Think of Virginia Woolf, 'A Room of One's Own' - that's what women have always needed under patriarchy and can't be creative without. They took away my classroom and my status to teach, and now they have taken away my office, and all of it is giving the message that Virginia Woolf and I are losing what I call 'womenspace.'
For me, I was born in the Bronx, and I moved to Virginia Beach, Virginia at a very young age. I had the luxury of going back to New York, visiting my grandmother who would spoil me endlessly, and I could buy whatever was the hot kicks in the summertime of 1990. Being able to shop and then going back to Virginia Beach, where they weren't as fast in regards to fashion, I had that luxury.
Set your sights not just on the next few weeks ... set your sights on the years ahead - because our vision will look that far ahead.
I had ambitions to set out and find, like an odyssey or going home somewhere, set out to find this home that I'd left a while back and couldn't remember exactly where it was, but I was on my way there. And encountering what I encountered on the way was how I envisioned it all. I didn't really have any ambition at all. I was born very far from where I'm supposed to be, and so, I'm on my way home, you know?
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.
Virginia Woolf was wrong. You do not need a room of your own to write.
If you want to be a virtuoso then you have to set your sights above me. You have to go beyond what I'm doing. And that's for you to figure out. Because if you can do that, then I'm going to be trying to go beyond you.
I try to find some sort of meditative hobby to do on set, and it's different for every film. There's a lot of downtime, but I don't like reading on set because it feels like you're taking yourself out of your world, instead of being present. And then, you feel like you're not ready to do whatever you have to do.
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.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
You can't really control how people are going to feel about you; all you can really do is be yourself. Because if you seduce somebody, and you seduce them by pretending to be a certain way, once they are seduced they are going to find that you are not that way. And then you have to maintain an image that's not real, so you really screw yourself. The best is to be yourself and hope they like you.
The notion of the writer as a kind of sociological sample of a community is ludicrous. Even worse is the notion that writers should provide an example of how to live. Virginia Woolf ended her life by putting a rock in her sweater one day and walking into a lake. She is not a model of how I want to live my life. On the other hand, the bravery of her syntax, of her sentences, written during her deepest depression, is a kind of example for me. But I do not want to become Virginia Woolf. That is not why I read her.
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.
When you see where it is you're going, yet you are unable to sacrifice yourself to set yourself free then remember that from my experience you are able to just push harder than you ever 'thought' yourself capable of. Once one being sets themselves free from the chaos and becomes the living example of freedom then surely you are indeed free to do the same.
The great tragedy of life is not that people set their sights too high and fail to achieve their goals but that they set their sights too low and do.
I think that the way that I write stories is by instinct. You have some basic ideas - a character, or an image, or a situation that sounds compelling - and then you just feel your way around until you find the edges of your story. It's like going into a dark room... you stumble around until you find the walls and then inch your way to the light switch.
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