V. S. Pritchett Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
Yes, well I had all my serious illnesses in late middle age. And now I'm just stuck, I'm afraid.

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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.

V. S. Pritchett
I come from a set of storytellers and moralists.... The storytellers were forever changing the tale and the moralists tampering with it in order to put it in an edifying light.

V. S. Pritchett