Virginia Woolf: The Complete Works

by Virginia Woolf

Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw

Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it—the poets and the novelists—can be trusted to do it,

at the back of her brain (which is the part furthest from sight),

“borrow”? Rhyme is not only childish, but dishonest, we prose writers say.

Never think yourself singular, never think your own case much harder than other people’s.

And for heaven’s sake, publish nothing before you are thirty.