Michael Holroyd famous quotes

Between history and the novel stands biography, their unwanted offspring, which has brought a great embarrassment to them both.
-- Michael Holroyd

#Biographies #Embarrassment #Novel

Inthehistorian'sview biography isa kindoffrogspawn it takes ten thousand biographies to make one small history.
-- Michael Holroyd

#Biographies #Thousand #Ten

I think that when one is dead one should be a little bit bolder, so that the rest of us may have some record of how things actually were.
-- Michael Holroyd

#Thinking #Records #May

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...