Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

"For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice."

"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."

"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."

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."

"Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream."

"Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others."

"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners."

"Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?"

"Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream."

"It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road."

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

"Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."