5 Quotes by Victoria Glendinning

Elizabeth disliked the tragic, martyred image of Virginia Woolf which grew up after her death. When she read the first volume of William Plomer's autobiography, At Home, in 1958, she told him that ‘only you seem to bring back Virginia's laughter - I get so bored and irked by the tragic fiction which has been manufactured about her since 1941.

Science, or para-science, tells us that geraniums bloom better if they are spoken to. But a kind word every now and then is really quite enough. Too much attention, like too much feeding, and weeding and hoeing, inhibits and embarrasses them.

The facts of life are to the biographer what the text of a novel is to the critic.

Elizabeth disliked the tragic, martyred image of Virginia Woolf which grew up after her death. When she read the first volume of William Plomer’s autobiography, At Home, in 1958, she told him that ’only you seem to bring back Virginia’s laughter – I get so bored and irked by the tragic fiction which has been manufactured about her since 1941.

There’s no greater bliss in life than when the plumber eventually comes to unblock your drains. No writer can give that sort of pleasure.