Virginia Woolf’s diary, 1930

Sunday it is. And I have just exclaimed: “And now I can think of nothing else.” Thanks to my pertinacity and industry, I can now hardly stop making up The Waves.…

I am 48: we have been at Rodmell—a wet, windy day again; but on my birthday we walked among the downs, like the folded wings of grey birds; and saw first one fox,…

To lie on the sofa for a week. I am sitting up today in the usual state of unequal animation. Below normal, with spasmodic desire to write, then to doze. It is a…

I must canter my wits if I can. Perhaps some character sketches.

The test of a book (to a writer) is if it makes a space in which, quite naturally, you can say what you want to say. As this morning I could say what Rhoda said.…

Yes, but this book is a very queer business. I had a day of intoxication when I said “Children are nothing to this”: when I sat surveying the whole book complete…

What I now think (about The Waves) is that I can give in a very few strokes the essentials of a person’s character. It should be done boldly; almost as caricature.…

I read Shakespeare directly I have finished writing. When my mind is agape and red-hot. Then it is astonishing. I never yet knew how amazing his stretch and speed…

And I have completely ruined my morning. Yes that is literally true. They sent a book from The Times, as if advised by Heaven of my liberty; and feeling my liberty…

The Waves is I think resolving itself (I am at page 100) into a series of dramatic soliloquies. The thing is to keep them running homogeneously in and out, in the…

I will signalise my return to life—that is writing—by beginning a new book, and it happens to be Thoby’s birthday, I remark. He would have been, I think, 50 today.…

No, I cannot write that very difficult passage in The Waves this morning (how their lives hang lit up against the Palace) all because of Arnold Bennett and Ethel’s*…

One word of slight snub in the Lit. Sup. today makes me determine, first, to alter the whole of The Waves; second, to put my back up against the public—one word of…

This, I think, is the last day’s breathing space I allow myself before I tackle the last lap of The Waves. I have had a week off—that is to say I have written three…

It occurred to me last night while listening to a Beethoven quartet that I would merge all the interjected passages into Bernard’s final speech and end with the…

But what’s the use of talking about Bernard’s final speech? We came down on Tuesday and next day my cold was the usual influenza and I am in bed with the usual…