Quotes from Victoria Glendinning

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.

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

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.

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.

Dr Pessimist Anticant never recognised 'that in this world no good is unalloyed, and that there is but little evil that has not in it some seed of what is goodly.