Quotes About Pritchett

#1. Who is this vague "they" we blame for so many of our problems? "They" is the obscure party we use as our whipping boy to camouflage the fact that we - you and I and other specific human beings just like us - have to start doing things differently. "They" can't fix anything. We can.

Price Pritchett

#2. So let your deepest desires direct your aim. Set your sights far above the 'reasonable' target. The power of purpose is profound only if you have a desire that stirs the heart.

Price Pritchett

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

V.S. Pritchett

#4. Excellence calls for character ... integrity ... fairness ... honesty ... a determination to do what's right. High ethical standards, across the board.

Price Pritchett

#5. The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.

V.S. Pritchett

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

V.S. Pritchett

#7. The only way we can develop muscle is through regular exercise. As soon as we stop stretching and working toward higher ethics, our standards start to sag. The muscle gets soft, and instead of excellence we have to settle for mediocrity. Maybe something even worse.

Price Pritchett

#8. The world behaves differently when I take action to go after what I want.

Price Pritchett

#9. Your ethical muscle grows stronger every time you choose right over wrong.

Price Pritchett

#10. 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

#11. We've got to start thinking of school as a lifelong process. That's the only way we'll keep abreast and be able to share in the wealth of the new "knowledge society."

Price Pritchett

#12. 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

#13. Nobody ever stopped reading E. B. White or V. S. Pritchett because the writing was too good.

William Zinsser

#14. If you're experiencing no anxiety or discomfort, the risk you're taking probably isn't worthy of you. The only risks that aren't a little scary are the ones you've outgrown.

Price Pritchett

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. And I bet it's harder than people think, isn't it? Everything looks so simple from a distance. Then, the more you look, the more you see. And that's when you have to rise to the challenge.

Laura Pritchett

#19. V. S. Pritchett was one of the most admired, fun, talked-about writers of the 20th century: he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his work with prose. He was born in 1900, wrote till he died in 1997, and has been tidily forgotten ever since. This is a real shame.

Darin Strauss

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. The secret of happiness is to find a congenial monotony.

V.S. Pritchett

#24. Notice that "I" is at the center of the word "ethical." There is no "they." Achieving the ethics of excellence is our individual assignment.

Price Pritchett

#25. 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

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

V.S. Pritchett

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

V.S. Pritchett

#28. You have to get beyond blaming others ... give up your excuses ... stand responsible for what you do ... ultimately, ethics ends up an individual exercise.

Price Pritchett

#29. Most people confuse wishing and wanting with pursuing. You must place your trust in action.

Price Pritchett

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

V.S. Pritchett

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

V.S. Pritchett

#32. You can't put someone else in charge of your morals. Ethics is a personal discipline.

Price Pritchett

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

V.S. Pritchett

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

V.S. Pritchett

#35. The ethics of excellence requires a sense of perspective. Look at the big picture. If you live for the moment you might mortgage the future? What happens if you put your reputation at risk and lose the bet?

Price Pritchett

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

V.S. Pritchett

#37. Eventually we have to "settle up" and pay the price for our ethical violations. Just remember the old line that says, "You can pay me now ... or you can pay me later." Often you can buy some time, but when you "pay later" you'll probably have to pay more.

Price Pritchett

#38. 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

#39. How can we be trusted with big things if we're not trustworthy with things that are small? Don't allow your finer instincts to become a casualty of the little everyday crimes of ethical compromise.

Price Pritchett

#40. If you're unwilling to defer pleasure or endure some "pain" for now, are you likely to end up later deep in the hole?

Price Pritchett

#41. Give people, including yourself, clear permission to make mistakes ... and to fix the problems. Since nobody's perfect, mistakes should be allowed. Cover-ups shouldn't. Cover-ups create twice the trouble.

Price Pritchett

#42. 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

#43. If you must doubt something, doubt your limits.

Price Pritchett

#44. We can't win the struggle for high standards if we just talk a good game ... we've got to play a good game.

Price Pritchett

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. On short stories:
something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.

V.S. Pritchett

#48. Too much attention on problems kills our faith in possibilities.

Price Pritchett

#49. Only in a place like this do earth and sky come together in such a way that they bridge into one, and in such a place a person could put up her arms and find herself in heaven.

Laura Pritchett

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

V.S. Pritchett

#51. Optimism inspires, energizes, and brings out our best. It points the mind toward possibilities and helps us think creatively past problems.

Price Pritchett

#52. As consumers we get more demanding all the time. We want better quality. We want it faster. And cheaper. Plus, we want more choices. Whoever comes along that can satisfy all these 'wants' gets our business.

Price Pritchett

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

V.S. Pritchett

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

V.S. Pritchett

#55. 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

#56. We need timeless principles to steer by in running our organizations and building our personal careers. We need high standards
the ethics of excellence.

Price Pritchett

#57. 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

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

V.S. Pritchett

#59. The ethics of excellence are grounded in action - what you actually do, rather than what you say you believe. Talk, as the saying goes, is cheap.

Price Pritchett

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

V.S. Pritchett

#61. If you become a giver, you'll make them feel like they want to reciprocate.

Price Pritchett

#62. Ethical dilemmas have a way of sneaking up on a person. If something smells funny, stay away from it. Or help get rid of it.

Price Pritchett

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

V.S. Pritchett

#64. 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

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

V.S. Pritchett

#66. Live according to the ethics of excellence, and you can always stand proud. Pride - not vanity, but dignity and self-respect - should carry a lot of weight in helping you make decisions. Let pride help you decide.

Price Pritchett

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

V.S. Pritchett

#68. No sense being pessimistic. Wouldn't work anyway.

Price Pritchett

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

V.S. Pritchett

#70. Art is what gets us beyond what is real. It makes reality more real. It also shortens the distance we gotta travel to see how connected we are.

Laura Pritchett

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

V.S. Pritchett

#72. Until I test the limits to what I can achieve, I won't really know how well I can do.

Price Pritchett

#73. I'll figure out how to be truer: to let people go if they need to be let go of, and to hold on tight if that's what's called for. I will pay attention, so I can cross each human heart that comes across my path, cross it as true as I can.

Laura Pritchett

#74. quietness has a strange, buzzing hum that can nearly break you apart.

Laura Pritchett

#75. Act as if success is certain.

Price Pritchett

#76. In these times of self-directed teams, empowered employees, and "boundaryless" organizations, your worth as an individual employee will also get measured by your work group's collective results.

Price Pritchett

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

V.S. Pritchett

#78. If you can't get what you want, you end up doing something else, just to get some relief. Just to keep from going crazy. Because when you're sad enough, you look for ways to fill you up.

Laura Pritchett

#79. 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

#80. Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.

V.S. Pritchett

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

V.S. Pritchett

#82. When you see people with "the right stuff," those who choose the right over the wrong or the "iffy," let them know you're proud of them. Encourage the courageous, so they'll have the will to carry on.

Price Pritchett

#83. Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.

V.S. Pritchett

#84. But when we get enough people who don't care, and who don't accept personal responsibility for high ethical standards, our organization gets the "M" disease. Mediocrity. Anybody in the place can be a carrier. By the same token, every individual can carry the cure: the ethics of excellence.

Price Pritchett

#85. 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

#86. High personal standards aren't enough for organizational excellence. You've got to be intolerant of low standards in others ... If you accommodate questionable practices in others who touch your organization, you risk soiling its reputation. Anybody whose hands aren't clean can get the place dirty.

Price Pritchett

#87. Everybody makes honest mistakes, but there's no such thing as an honest cover-up.

Price Pritchett

#88. As tough as it sometimes looks on the front end, it's easier to do right than undo wrong.

Price Pritchett

#89. Because the difference between a friend and a real friend is that you and the real friend come from the same territory, of the same place deep inside you, and that means you see the world in the same kind of way. You know each other even before you do.

Laura Pritchett

#90. Narrow life down to what's precious and necessary. In a world of complexity the best weapon is simplicity.

Price Pritchett

#91. 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

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

V.S. Pritchett

#93. Optimism is a much more enabling mindset than hard-core realism, and it's far superior to pessimism ... [because] Hope helps move us in the direction of our goals and ambitions.

Price Pritchett

#94. For some reason I believed that if you fell in love it was a guaranteed thing that your path would cross with his, and I never wondered how if would feel to fall in love with a man whose future just couldn't include you.

Laura Pritchett

#95. 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

#96. I think humans are only capable of small moments of honesty. Then they get tired and back away. It's something to foster, this ability to keep it for longer. How to keep being honest and aware.

Laura Pritchett

#97. You carve out the organization's character through your daily choices. You shape its conscience as you exercise your own.

Price Pritchett

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

V.S. Pritchett

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

V.S. Pritchett

#100. When you can make it this simple, though, just do the right thing. Even if you could get away with less. Even when other people are doing the wrong thing. Even though the wrong thing seems like no big deal.

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