“I wouldn't say I was a born writer; I'm a born thinker.”

“You are either born a writer or you are not.”

“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”

“Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.”

“The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.”

“Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent”

“I was a countryman and a father before I was a writer on political subjects…. Born and bred up in the sweet air myself, I was resolved that [my children] should be bred up in it too.”

“Here I come to one of the memoir writer’s difficulties — one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: ‘This is what happened’; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. Who was I then? Adeline Virginia Stephen, the second daughter of Leslie and Julia Prinsep Stephen, born on 25th January 1882, descended from a great many people, some famous, others obscure; born into a large connection, born not of rich parents, but of well-to-do parents, born into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world.”

“Make way, you Roman writers, make way, Greeks!
Something greater than the Iliad is born.”
Cedite Romani scriptores, cedite Grai! Nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade.

“As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I'm not sure that I'm going to be a good one or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says 'you are nothing', I will be a writer.”