A Room of One's Own

by Virginia Woolf

Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?

Why are women, judging from this catalogue, so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

At any rate, one would not have been ashamed to have been caught in the act of writing Pride and Prejudice. Yet Jane Austen was glad that a hinge creaked, so that she might hide her manuscript before anyone came in.

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer! We might perhaps have most of Othello; and a good deal of Antony; but no Caesar, no Brutus, no Hamlet, no Lear, no Jaques--literature would be incredibly impoverished, as indeed literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women.

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.

I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else.