Top 53 Quotes & Sayings by V. S. Pritchett

The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.

In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.

The secret of happiness is to find a congenial monotony.

How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.

Life - how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.

Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.

Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.

I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.

We do not wish to be better than we are, but more fully what we are.

[London is] like the sight of a heavy sea from a rowing boat in the middle of the Atlantic.... One lives in it, afloat but half submerged in a heavy flood of brick, stone, asphalt, slate, steel, glass, concrete, and tarmac, seeing nothing fixable beyond a few score white spires that splash up like spits of foam above the next glum wave of dirty buildings.

We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.

The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.

It's very important to feel foreign. I was born in England, but when I'm being a writer, everyone in England is foreign to me.

The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.

It is often said that in Ireland there is an excess of genius unsustained by talent; but there is talent in the tongues.

The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.

A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.

Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious piety and parlour game.

[London] is sentimental and tolerant. The attitude to foreigners is like the attitude to dogs: Dogs are neither human nor British, but so long as you keep them under control, give them their exercise, feed them, pat them, you will find their wild emotions are amusing, and their characters interesting.

Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.

Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.

Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.

Some writers thrive on the contact with the commerce of success; others are corrupted by it. Perhaps, like losing one's virginity,it is not as bad (or as good) as one feared it was going to be.

It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.

It is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else.

It is exciting and emancipating to believe we are one of nature's latest experiments, but what if the experiment is unsuccessful?

Now, practically all reviewers have academic aspirations. The people from the universities are used to a captive audience, but the literary journalist has to please his audience.

It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.

Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.

Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.

It is the role of the poet to look at what is happening in the world and to know that quite other things are happening.

I felt the beginning of a passion, hopeless in the long run, but very nourishing, for identifying myself with people who were not my own, and whose lives were governed by ideas alien to mine.

The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.

The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.

Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.

There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.

The difference between farce and humour in literature is, I suppose, that farce strums louder and louder on one string, while humour varies its note, changes its key, grows and spreads and deepens until it may indeed reach tragic depths.

A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.

All writers - all people - have their stores of private and family legends which lie like a collection of half-forgotten, often violent toys on the floor of memory.

On one plane, the very great writers and the popular romancers of the lower order always meet. They use all of themselves, helplessly, unselectively. They are above the primness and good taste of declining to give themselves away.

Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

The businessman who is a novelist is able to drop in on literature and feel no suicidal loss of esteem if the lady is not at home, and he can spend his life preparing without fuss for the awful interview.

Among the masked dandies of Edwardian comedy, Max Beerbohm is the most happily armored by a deep and almost innocent love of himself as a work of art.

The novel...creates a bemusing effect. The short story, on the other hand wakes the reader up. Not only that, it answers the primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience.

Absolute Evil is not the kingdom of hell. The inhabitants of hell are ourselves, i.e., those who pay our painful, embarrassing, humanistic duties to society and who are compromised by our intellectually dubious commitment to virtue, which can be defined by the perpetual smear-word of French polemic: the bourgeois. (Bourgeois equals humanist.) This word has long been anathema in France where categories are part of the ruling notion of logique. The word cannot be readily matched in England or America.

The present has its élan because it is always on the edge of the unknown and one misunderstands the past unless one remembers that this unknown was once part of its nature.

Because of the influence of the cinema, most reports or stories of violence are so pictorial that they lack content or meaning. The camera brings them to our eyes, but does not settle them in our minds, nor in time.

Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.

One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic potential.

A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.

The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.

I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.

The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.