V. S. Pritchett Quotes

• A short story is always a disclosure.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  V. S. Pritchett

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  V. S. Pritchett

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  V. S. Pritchett

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  V. S. Pritchett

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  V. S. Pritchett

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  V. S. Pritchett

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  V. S. Pritchett

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  V. S. Pritchett

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writing

• In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Topics in Family, Uncategorized

  Tags in Born

• The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Critical

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

  V. S. Pritchett

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Extraordinary

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

  V. S. Pritchett

  Topics in Life

• The secret of happiness is to find a congenial monotony.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Secret, Happiness

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

  V. S. Pritchett

  Topics in Youth

  Tags in Time

V. S. Pritchett (19)

Birth:	16th December, 1900
Death:	20th March, 1997
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Critic, Writer

About

Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett, was a British writer and critic. He was particularly known for his short stories, collected in a number of volumes. His most famous nonfiction works are the memoirs A Cab at the Door and Midnight Oil, and his many collections of essays on literary biography and criticism.

Related Authors

• Stanley Crouch
• Harold Rosenberg
• Wesley Morris
• Philip Rieff
• George Woodcock
• Remy de Gourmont
• Arthur Sheekman
• Lester Bangs
• William Graham Sumner
• Alan Dershowitz

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 1st June

Births

• 1563 - Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury
• 1937 - Morgan Freeman
• 1965 - Nigel Short
• 1917 - William Standish Knowles
• 1964 - Alan Lewis

Deaths

• 2004 - William Manchester
• 1873 - Joseph Howe
• 1991 - David Ruffin
• 1971 - Reinhold Niebuhr
• 1925 - Thomas R. Marshall