V. S. Pritchett Quotes

42 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

V. S. Pritchett
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
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
Great artists are always far-seeing. They easily avoid the big stumbling blocks of fact. They rely on their own simplicity and vision. It is fact-fetichism that has given us those scores and scores of American books on America, the works of sociologists, anthropologists, topical "problem" hunters, working-parties and statisticians, which in the end leave us empty. Henry James succeeds because he rejects information. He was himself the only information he required.

V. S. Pritchett
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.

V. S. Pritchett
There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.

V. S. Pritchett
Our laughter is only a note or two short of a scream of fear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

V. S. Pritchett
The principle of procrastinated rape is said to be the ruling one in all the great best-sellers.

V. S. Pritchett
The nineteenth century will colonize; so, in its fantasies, did the nineteenth century soul. When Emma [Bovary] turns spendthrift and buys curtains, carpets and hangings from the draper, the information takes on something from the theme of the novel itself: the material is a symbol of the exotic, and the exotic feeds the Romantic appetite. It will lead to satiety, bankruptcy and eventually to nihilism and the final drive towards death and nothingness.

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

V. S. Pritchett
I found people were telling stories to themselves without knowing it. It seemed to me that people were living a sort of small sermon that they believed in, but at the same time it was a fairy tale. Selfish desires, along with one or two highly suspect elevated thoughts. They secretly regard themselves as works of art, valuable in themselves.

V. S. Pritchett
Mass society destroys the things it is told are its inheritance. It is rarely possible to see the Abbey without being surrounded by thousands of tourists from all over the world. Like St. Peter's at Rome, it has been turned into a sinister sort of railway terminal. The aisles are as crowded as the pavements of Oxford Street or the alleys of a large shop, imagination is jostled, awe dispersed, and the mind never at rest. All great things, in our time, can only be seen in fragments, by fragmentary people.

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

V. S. Pritchett
Most comic writers like to think they could play it straight if only their public would let them. Waugh is able to be grave without difficulty for he has always been comic for serious reasons. He has his own, almost romantic sense of propriety.

V. S. Pritchett
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