Literary Birthday - Virginia Woolf, 25 January

Happy Birthday, Virginia Woolf, born 25 January 1882, died 28 March 1941
Virginia Woolf: Top 10 Quotes On Writing

1. A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
2. I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
3. It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others. 
4. Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works. 
5. Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
6. It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.
7. If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
8. A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.
9. Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible. 
10. The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mould of the body and mind.

Woolf was an English writer, and an important figure in London literary society. She was a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando. Interest in Virginia Woolf and her writings revived with the feminist writings in the 1970s.

from Writers Write