Top 49 V.S. Pritchett Quotes

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

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #53745
#2. The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #91391
#3. I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #95454
#4. 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.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #142593
#5. 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.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #158780
#6. 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.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #220728
#7. 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.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #242274
#8. 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.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #287137
#9. Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #312713
#10. 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.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #330244
#11. It is exciting and emancipating to believe we are one of nature's latest experiments, but what if the experiment is unsuccessful?

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #342510
#12. The secret of happiness is to find a congenial monotony.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #350955
#13. 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.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #358860
#14. The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #379375
#15. Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #389033
#16. Life - how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #456165
#17. A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #457864
#18. How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #503402
#19. The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #519836
#20. We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #531404
#21. It is often said that in Ireland there is an excess of genius unsustained by talent; but there is talent in the tongues.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #591629
#22. 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.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #684973
#23. 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.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #709971
#24. One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic potential.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #731756
#25. On short stories:
something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #748228
#26. The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #851812
#27. I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #921247
#28. The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #926652
#29. 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.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #946861
#30. He (Orwell) always made an impression of the passing traveler who meets one on the station, points out that one is waiting for the wrong train, and vanishes

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #959382
#31. Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #1040937
#32. The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #1095211
#33. Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #1131211
#34. 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.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #1141830
#35. It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #1144949
#36. There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #1177879
#37. In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #1217221
#38. It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #1266324
#39. A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #1334106
#40. 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.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #1413881
#41. Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #1417727
#42. Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #1428108
#43. Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #1489747
#44. 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.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #1599049
#45. 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.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #1686227
#46. We do not wish to be better than we are, but more fully what we are.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #1688405
#47. 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.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #1749003
#48. The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #1849129
#49. It is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else.

V.S. Pritchett

V.S. Pritchett Quotes #1849880

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