It is okay to experiment with language. Writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf experimented with writing, but basically, one must have a familiarity with the language. And to have that, one must respect it.
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's writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.
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.'
All writers must go from now to once a upon a time; all must go from here to there; all must descend to where the stories are kept; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past.
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.
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.
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.
We must be clear about what we want to paint. This adds a further principle to our previous list of principles. We have said we must be fond of this world, even in order to change it.
We must go beyond the arrogance of human rights. We must go beyond the ignorance of civil rights. We must step into the reality of natural rights because all of the natural world has a right to existence and we are only a small part of it. There can be no trade-off.
Birth control is the first important step woman must take toward the goal of her freedom. It is the first step she must take to be man's equal. It is the first step they must both take toward human emancipation.
Our words must be judged by our deeds; and in striving for a lofty ideal we must use practical methods; and if we cannot attain all at one leap, we must advance towards it step by step, reasonably content so long as we do actually make some progress in the right direction.
I must apologize for calling so late," said he, "and I must further beg you to be so unconventional as to allow me to leave your house presently by scrambling over your back garden wall.
My teachers always said, "You're very talented, but don't set your heart on art. You're only a girl." I was inspired by Virginia Woolf in 1960, but they wouldn't let me write about her. They said she was a trivializer. I also wanted to do a paper on Simone de Beauvoir, and my philosophy teacher said, "Why would you write about the mistress? Write about the master." That was Sartre.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
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.