Jane Goldman Quotes & Sayings

It's really weird because my house is very ornate, but my writing lair is very, very blank. It's white, the furniture is white. It gives me nothing to look at, so I just have to concentrate! — Jane Goldman

Leonard and Virginia married in August 1912. Virginia was 30. Soon after her marriage she suVered another breakdown and her mental health declined sporadically over the following year, culminating in a suicide attempt in September 1913. They were advised against having children because of Virginia's recurring depressive illness, a cause of some regret to her, and a point of much heated debate among her later biographers. — Jane Goldman

In 1925 Woolf began an affair with Sackville-West, who was married to Harold Nicolson, the diplomat and writer, and the development of their close relationship, which does not seem to have undermined either woman's marriage, coincided with Woolf 's most productive years as a writer. — Jane Goldman

Vengeance is the act of turning anger in on yourself. On the surface it may be directed at someone else, but it is a surefire recipe for arresting emotional recovery. — Jane Goldman

You need to be invested in what happens. The characters are your conduit to the story. Many modern horror films are fun but not frightening because one has not connected with the characters. — Jane Goldman

Woolf 's control over the production of her own work is a significant factor in her genesis as a writer. The Hogarth Press became an important and influential publishing house in the decades that followed. It was responsible, for example, for the first major works of Freud in English, beginning in 1922, and published significant works by key modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein. Woolf herself set the type for the Hogarth edition of
Eliot's The Waste Land (1923), which he read to them in June 1922, and which she found to have 'great beauty & force of phrase: symmetry; & tensity. What connects it together, I'm not so sure' (D2 178). — Jane Goldman

I play 'World of Warcraft,' which means I end up hanging out with teenage boys a lot. — Jane Goldman

Normally with film, it's normal for the screenwriter to never be seen again after finishing until the premiere. — Jane Goldman

I really enjoy the company of my kids ... I'm not one of those people who goes 'Yeah, my kids are my mates', that's a dreadful kind of mother, but I'm fortunate that there are times that they do want me around, and I feel lucky that they let me into their world. — Jane Goldman

I know what I miss as a cinemagoer is that balance of films that actually scare me, they're so few and far between. I loved ghost stories, I love horror stories, I love all of that stuff, but I really yearn for something to actually frighten me. — Jane Goldman

I think it's part of everybody's childhood, there are some wonderful Hammer movies and there are some dreadful ones ... — Jane Goldman

It is important to recognise Woolf 's acknowledgement of her father's dually formative influence. The domestic
dictator was also an intellectual who powerfully shaped her developing intellect, even if, at times, antithetically so: 'just as a dog takes a bite of grass, I take a bite of him medicinally — Jane Goldman

Woolf criticism has not evolved smoothly, and it would be misleading to say that any one approach or interpretation has ever prevailed to the exclusion of others. There are continuities and discontinuities in trends and arguments,
areas of common ground and major points of dispute. — Jane Goldman

I think when you really adore something and you've grown up with it you almost don't want to be part of it. I want to enjoy it as a fan and don't want to ruin the magic. — Jane Goldman

Woolf turned her back on a number of tokens of her rising eminence in the 1930s, including an offer of the Companion of Honour award, an invitation from Cambridge University to give the Clark lectures, and honorary doctorate degrees from Manchester University and Liverpool University.
'It is an utterly corrupt society,' she wrote in her diary, '. . . & I will take nothing that it can give me — Jane Goldman

Japanese horror films take the business of being frightening seriously. There is no attempt at postmodernism or humour. They are incredibly melancholy, with a strong emotional core, while remaining absolutely terrifying. — Jane Goldman

There are numerous biographies of Woolf. Biography has been highly influential in shaping the reception ofWoolf 's work, and her life has been as much debated as her writing. I would recommend the following three which
represent three different biographical contexts and a range of positions on Woolf 's life: Quentin Bell's Virginia Woolf: A Biography (1972), Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf (1996), and Julia Briggs's Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life
(2005). There is no one, true biography of Woolf (as, indeed, there cannot be of any subject of biography), but these three mark important phases in the writing and rewriting of Woolf 's life. Hot debate continues over how biographers represent her mental health, her sexuality, her politics, her suicide, and of course her art, and over how we are to understand the latter in relation to all the former points of contention. — Jane Goldman

Leslie Stephen died in 1904. In that year his children retreated to Wales for a period and then travelled in Italy. Vanessa and Virginia went on to Paris, where they met up with Clive Bell. On returning to London, Virginia suffered
a severe, suicidal breakdown. — Jane Goldman

Woolf drew on her memories of her holidays in Cornwall for To the Lighthouse, which was conceived in part as an elegy on her parents. Her father was a vigorous walker and an Alpinist of some renown, a member of the Alpine Club and editor of the Alpine Journal from 1868 to 1872; he was the first person to climb the Schreckhorn in the Alps and he wrote on Alpine pleasures in The Playground of Europe (1871). By the time he married Julia Duckworth in 1878, however, a more sedentary Leslie Stephen was the established editor of the Cornhill Magazine, from which he later resigned to take up the editorship of the Dictionary of National Biography in 1882, the year of Woolf 's birth. Stephen laboured on this monumental Victorian enterprise until 1990, editing single-handed the first twenty-six volumes and writing well over 300 biographical entries. He also published numerous volumes of criticism, the most important of which were on eighteenth-century thought and literature. — Jane Goldman

The daughter of the literary biographer Leslie Stephen, and close friend of the innovative biographer of the Victorians, Lytton Strachey, Woolf herself put forward, in 'The New Biography' (1927) (reviewing work by another biographer acquaintance, Harold Nicolson), her own memorable theory of biography, encapsulated in her phrase 'granite and rainbow'. 'Truth' she envisions 'as something of granite-like solidity', and 'personality as
something of rainbow-like intangibility', and 'the aim of biography', she proposes, 'is to weld these two into one seamless whole' (E4 473). The following short biographical account ofWoolf will attempt to keep to the basic granitelike facts that Woolf novices need to know, while also occasionally attending in brief to the more elusive, but equally relevant, matter of rainbow-like personality. — Jane Goldman

Teenagers come to things fresh and can really teach us an awful lot. — Jane Goldman

I'm not too easily distracted now I've had practice, but I write with nothing to look at. I used to rent an office that just had a view of a wall! — Jane Goldman

Bloomsbury lost Fry, in 1934, and Lytton Strachey before him, in January 1932, to early deaths. The loss of Strachey
was compounded by Carrington's suicide just two months after, in March. Another old friend, Ka Cox, died of a heart attack in 1938. But the death, in 1937, of Woolf 's nephew Julian, in the Spanish Civil War, was perhaps the
bitterest blow. Vanessa found her sister her only comfort: 'I couldn't get on at all if it weren't for you' (VWB2 203). Julian, a radical thinker and aspiring writer, campaigned all his life against war, but he had to be dissuaded by his
family from joining the International Brigade to fight Franco. Instead he worked as an ambulance driver, a role that did not prevent his death from shrapnel wounds. Woolf 's Three Guineas, she wrote to his mother, was
written 'as an argument with him — Jane Goldman

The book is the book and it will always be there. It's a quiet ending. In the book it's a contemplative ending which I think you could certainly do that in a movie. — Jane Goldman

Modernism and feminism are two broad axes on which Woolf criticism turns, and there are many other categories that reflect the range of positions available in literary criticism more generally, such as postmodernist, psychoanalytical,
historicist, materialist, postcolonial, and so on. — Jane Goldman

I don't tend to be a nitpicker when I'm watching movies, so as long as something is true to the spirit of the original, that's very much what we got for. You try to never do something that the original author wouldn't have done themselves. — Jane Goldman

In 1922 Woolf met the writer Vita Sackville-West, who was to join Vanessa Bell and Leonard Woolf as the most significant people in her life. — Jane Goldman

I've yet to meet a bitter teenager. Bitterness, jealousy and jadedness, I think, are the most unattractive qualities in a person, and unfortunately they do seem to come with age. — Jane Goldman