Michael Holroyd famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.
I realize that I had always in my heart of hearts planned to write a biography of Marie Antoinette.
Childhood is what ended me up in the hospital and teetering on the edge of deathly alcoholism. It was really good for me to accept it. To accept all the embarrassment and the shame so I don't feel like I used to.
I'm not a big texter anyway. I'm really slow at it and so I try to avoid it to avoid embarrassment, you know what I mean?
Embarrassment is a partner in the creative act.
Because I am an Englishman I spent most of my life in a state of embarrassment.
Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.
The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce.
An old novel has a history of its own.
NOVEL, n. A short story padded...

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