A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. For my belief is that if we live another century or so - I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals and have five hundred a year each of us and have rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body she has so often laid down.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own