Vita Sackville-West

“Ambition, old as mankind, the immemorial weakness of the strong.”

“Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this.”

“I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple despe...”

“With me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.”

“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone...”

“I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross; that its to be pulled through...”

“Nothing shows up the difference between the things said or read, so much as the daily experience of it.”

“There are no signposts in the sea.”

“Authority has every reason to fear the skeptic, for authority can rarely survive in the face of doubt.”

“Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.”