V. S. Pritchett Quotes

‘The firm’-a proud Victorian word. It evokes the lost sense of Victorian regard for the pride of people in their daily trade.

A short story is always a disclosure.

The poet is a master of the quotidian, of conveying a whole history in two or three lines that point to an exact past drama and intensify a future one.

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.

What Chekhov saw in our failure to communicate was something positive and precious: the private silence in which we live, and which enables us to endure our own solitude.

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

Dickens was not the first or the last novelist to find virtue more difficult to portray than the wish for it.

If evil does not exist, what is going to happen to literature?

He watched his restless hands, surprised they had remembered to come with him.

The detective novel is…the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.

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

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