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Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Virginia Woolf was wrong. You do not need a room of your own to write.
At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year.
In school, I was Martha in 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' I loved that.
'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' is, to my mind, a work of perfect genius.
My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.
Mrs Woolf's complaint should be addressed to her creator, who made her, rather than me.
Virginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I'll go a step further. You must be bisexual.
I like reading... French, Russian classics - Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert. I also like Hemingway, Virginia Woolf.
I would love to play Mary in 'Long Day's Journey Into Night' or 'Virginia Woolf' or a comedy - just, like, a slapstick comedy.
When I saw Virginia Woolf, somewhere between the first and second acts, someone I had known as my mother became somebody else.
I've always looked to that play, 'Virginia Woolf,' for a cue - as far as any cue I might need as an actor for inspiration or as a writer.
I'd studied English literature at university, but I was also far more enamored with Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and James Joyce. That was my passion.
The greatest texts, I think, first dazzle, then with careful rereading, they instruct. I have learned from Virginia Woolf more than I even know how to articulate.
Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old.
I would like to sit down with Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, PJ Harvey, and Bjork. That would be a good dinner in my mind. Strong women. I think I would enjoy that.
I'm told I am over-choosy, and I shocked everybody by doing Jeffrey Archer. I did that to annoy everybody; sometimes, between Medea and Virginia Woolf, you can get punch-drunk.
I love reading other people's diaries, especially someone like Virginia Woolf's - such a formidable woman that it's a revelation when she shows you a more vulnerable side of herself.
I fell in love with Virginia Woolf in college. I especially admire how well she writes about daily life, how she captures so much meaning and consequence in the smallest details of a day.
There is something so hopeful about a diary, a journal, a new notebook, which Joan Didion and Virginia Woolf both wrote about. A blog. Perhaps we all are waiting for someone to discover us.
I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I'd hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy.
No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Hemingway's postwar novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war.
It may be that Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf were sitting around fretting about their Amazon reviews or their pre-pub whatever, but I kind of doubt it. I don't think that's how the work probably got made.
I think throughout the 20th century, for some reason, serious writers increasingly had contempt for the average reader. You can really see this in the letters of such people as Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
I grew up in a small town, in a small community, and I would not have had access to great plays when I was a kid were it not for the films of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' and 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.'
It is okay to experiment with language. Writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf experimented with writing, but basically, one must have a familiarity with the language. And to have that, one must respect it.
I think the kind of unexpected I really love is when you open books and the actual way of writing is different and interesting. Like reading Virginia Woolf for the first time or Lawrence Durrell for the first time.
'The Fugitive Kind,' 'Rope,' 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' - I watched all these as a way of reminding myself that you can do a movie based on a play. You can do a movie that stays in one place for a long stretch.
I was influenced by big, strong voices - writers like Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Jane Bowles; gay writers like Ed White, Michael Cunningham, Allen Hollinghurst; and contemporary lesbian writers, like Dorothy Allison.
I used to do karaoke with Patrick Woolf in a karaoke box, and he would ring me up and say, 'Come down and do karaoke with me here,' and then we'd sing Kate Bush songs and get really, really emotional and theatrical in the booth.
If you're writing an opinion piece, it's your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions.
I do not regret the years I spent reading the traditional canon of white male writers in school. I do regret reading so little else there: Austen, George Eliot and occasionally Woolf, likewise Wright, Ellison, Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks.
Vita Sackville-West is one of my favorite female icons. She was a writer and a prolific gardener, but she also had a relationship with Virginia Woolf, and she was married to Sir Harold Nicolson. She was a woman who lived outside of norms.
When you think about Broadway, you think broad and big, but the fact is there are so many plays that are very intimate, but fill a 1,500-seat house. Plays like 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' have deep moments of silence and intimacy to them.
Virginia Woolf came along in the early part of the century and essentially said through her writing, yes, big books can be written about the traditional big subjects. There is war. There is the search for God. These are all very important things.
Frank Morley, who had worked in London at Faber and Faber, was the new head of Harcourt Brace, and he hired me to start in 1940. The early years at Harcourt were wonderful. Almost my first assignment was Virginia Woolf's novel 'Between the Acts.'
Virginia Woolf's literature really transformed my own ideas about how to formally represent the passage of time and how time affects us. Specifically, the benchmarks are 'Mrs. Dalloway,' 'To the Lighthouse' and 'Orlando,' all of which have time as a central conceit.
Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I'm finishing, even if it's turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don't admit it, they're not being honest.
I don't attack any kind of script or shooting with some philosophy that is discernible even to myself. It might just be art and love: When I got my Academy Award for 'Virginia Woolf' in the middle of the Vietnam War, I said, 'I hope we can use our art for peace and love.'
It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends.
'Basic Black with Pearls' contains overt references to Virginia Woolf and covert ones to feminist classics like Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening' and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper.' The scholar Ruth Panofsky, who writes extensively about Weinzweig, sees echoes of George Eliot.
My earliest experience was reading Edward Albee's 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' at 8, you know, with a bunch of kids on my steps - on the stoops - and knowing that I wanted to direct them saying the lines. I don't really know how to articulate that 'cause there wasn't someone to show me.
As an actor, to go and see those shows - great plays like 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' and Clifford Odets's 'Golden Boy' - it's so exhilarating. I'd personally love to perform the role of Jerry in Edward Albee's 'The Zoo Story.' He's a transient, lost soul, and an example of humanity at its rawest.
After college, I went on a real big classics kick. Read everything by Faulkner, Hemingway, Woolf, Proust, Dostoevsky. And that classics train dropped me off at 'Dracula.' Halfway through it, I understood I'd never be going back, never 'leaving' the genre again. Since then, I've been on a fairly strict horror diet.
Think of Virginia Woolf, 'A Room of One's Own' - that's what women have always needed under patriarchy and can't be creative without. They took away my classroom and my status to teach, and now they have taken away my office, and all of it is giving the message that Virginia Woolf and I are losing what I call 'womenspace.'
My parents took me to see plays, starting from when I was very little. Oftentimes, I was too young to understand. I don't know what my parents were thinking - 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf' when I was eight years old, that kind of thing. So lots of times, I didn't understand what was going on, but I just loved the sound of dialogue.