V. S. Pritchett Quotes

21 quotes in 273 categories

• The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
• 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…
• [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…
• Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.
• All writers - all people - have their stores of private and family legends which lie like a collection of half-forgotten, often violent toys on…
• Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.
• The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.
• It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.
• How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.
• The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.
• Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
• Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.
• 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.
• It is exciting and emancipating to believe we are one of nature's latest experiments, but what if the experiment is unsuccessful?
• 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.
• A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.
• We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.
• 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…
• Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.
• The secret of happiness is to find a congenial monotony.

Browse V. S. Pritchett Quotes by Category