V. S. Pritchett Quotes

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.

Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.

It is exciting and emancipating to believe we are one of nature's latest experiments, but what if the experiment is unsuccessful?

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

Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.

It is often said that in Ireland there is an excess of genius unsustained by talent; but there is talent in the tongues.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

[London is] like the sight of a heavy sea from a rowing boat in the middle of the Atlantic.... One lives in it, afloat but half submerged in a heavy flood of brick, stone, asphalt, slate, steel, glass, concrete, and tarmac, seeing nothing fixable beyond a few score white spires that splash up like spits of foam above the next glum wave of dirty buildings.

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.

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

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