Friday, May 11, 2012

Virginia Woolf on Facts and Fiction

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.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
 
Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.

 

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