V. S. Pritchett quotes - page 2

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)
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. View quote
V. S. Pritchett
Wilson was not, in the academic sense, a scholar or historian. He was an enormous reader, one of those readers who are perpetually on the scent from book to book. He was the old-style man of letters, but galvanized and with the iron of purpose in him. View quote
V. S. Pritchett
Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind. View quote
V. S. Pritchett
The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed. View quote
V. S. Pritchett
I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30. View quote
V. S. Pritchett
It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened. View quote
V. S. Pritchett
We do not wish to be better than we are, but more fully what we are. View quote
V. S. Pritchett
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. View quote
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? View quote
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)
I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10. View quote
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. View quote
V. S. Pritchett
It is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else. View quote
V. S. Pritchett
A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale. View quote
V. S. Pritchett
Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story. View quote
V. S. Pritchett
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. View quote
V. S. Pritchett
Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress. View quote
V. S. Pritchett
Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism. View quote
V. S. Pritchett
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. View quote
V. S. Pritchett
The State, that craving rookery of committees and subcommittees. (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. View quote
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. View quote
V. S. Pritchett