October 1927

[...] having done my last article for the Tribune, & now being free again.
And instantly the usual exciting devices enter my mind: a biography beginning in the year 1500 & continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita [sackville-west]; only with a change about from one sex to another.

This is a book, I think I have said before, which I write after tea. [...] It is to be a small book, & written by Christmas.

I thought I could combine it with Fiction, but once the mind gets hot it cant stop; I walk making up phrases; sit, contriving scenes; am in short in the thick of the greatest rapture known to me; from which I have kept myself since last February, or earlier.
Talk of planning a book, or waiting for an idea! This one came in a rush; I said to pacify myself, being bored & stale with criticism, [...]

virginia woolf, diary

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Thu 23 June 1927

Sibyl has dropped me: & I don't feel the fall.

[...]

I am distressed by my failure to make cigarettes. I had a lesson from a man in Francis Street—cant do a thing with my fingers. Angelica is expert with hers already. Nessa says all painters are: this is a perquisite they get thrown in with their gift.

virginia woolf, diary

Sat 11 December 1926

I also have made up a passage for The Lighthouse: on people going away & the effect on one's feeling for them.

virginia woolf, diary

Tue 23 November 1926

I am re-doing six pages of Lighthouse daily. This is not I think, so quick as Mrs D. [mrs dalloway]: but then I find much of it very sketchy, & have to improvise on the typewriter. This I find much easier than re-writing in pen & ink. My present opinion is that it is easily the best of my books, fuller than J's R. [jacob's room] & less spasmodic, occupied with more interesting things than Mrs D. & not complicated with all that desperate accompaniment of madness. It is freer & subtler I think. Yet I have no idea yet of any other to follow it: [...]

virginia woolf, diary

Sat 20 March 1926

But what is to become of all these diaries, I asked myself yesterday. If I died, what would Leo make of them? He would be disinclined to burn them; he could not publish them. Well, he should make up a book from them, I think; & then burn the body. I daresay there is a little book in them: if the scraps & scratches were straightened out a little. God knows.

This is dictated by a slight melancholia, which comes upon me sometimes now, & makes me think I am old: I am ugly. I am repeating things. Yet, as far as I know, as a writer I am only now writing out my mind.

virginia woolf, diary

Summer 1926

Arnold Bennett says that the horror of marriage lies in its "dailiness".

virginia woolf, diary

Sat 19 November 1925

But I dont think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness; but only reached now in middle age.

virginia woolf, diary

Tue. 18 November 1924

What I was going to say was that I think writing must be formal.The art must be respected. This struck me reading some of my notes here, for, if one lets the mind run loose, it becomes egotistic: personal, which I detest; like Robert Graves. At the same time the irregular fire must be there; & perhaps to loose it, one must begin by being chaotic, but not appear in public like that.

[... ] No doubt Proust could say what I mean-that great writer whom I cannot read when I'm correcting, so persuasive is he. He makes it seem easy to write well; which only means that one is slipping along on borrowed skates.

virginia woolf, diary

Wed. 19 July 1922

Never, for goodness sake, set yourself to read Balzac through & talk about it. If you must do these athletics, do them in the bathroom.

virginia woolf, diary