Skip to content
quotesby

About this quote

What does it mean?
The speaker suggests Strachey's method involves reviewing all documents and selecting subjects based on dislike.
In plain terms
He told him to read everything and pick people he didn't like to write about.
What can you take from it?
Writing subjects can be chosen based on personal aversion rather than affinity.

Where it applies

  • writing research
  • biography selection
  • creative process

Putting it to work

  • choose difficult subjects
  • review all documents

Questions to consider

  • Should you write about those you dislike?
  • How do you choose subjects?

Another view

Dislike may lead to unfair or overly critical portrayals.

More from Lytton Strachey

  1. One observed a number of discordant features - a feminine sensibility, a delight in the absurd, a taste for exaggeration and melodrama, a very mature judgement…

    Permalink to quote #7
  2. To mark a man's faults and failings was, for Johnson, to indicate where he had diverged from his true relation to God; for Strachey it was an agreeable intelle…

    Permalink to quote #9
  3. His style is perfect joy, and it is only when one has come across a fairer and kindlier handling of one of his victims that one is resentful of his tittering.

    Permalink to quote #6

Related quotes

  1. In his references to my own work, Gould includes at least nine citations that involve more than just an expression of Gould's opinion; in these citations Gould…

    Stephen Jay GouldStephen Jay Gould quote #190
  2. In comparing various authors with one another, I have discovered that some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works…

    Pliny the ElderPliny the Elder quote #2
  3. Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the…

    Francis ParkmanFrancis Parkman quote #4