Quote

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

V. S. Pritchett

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

V. S. Pritchett
Age: 96 †
Born: 1900
Born: December 16
Died: 1997
Died: March 20
Biographer
Critic
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Ipswich (parish)
Observant
Assertive
Canadian
Cautious
Critical
American
Spirit

More quotes by V. S. Pritchett

Image
Because of the influence of the cinema, most reports or stories of violence are so pictorial that they lack content or meaning. The camera brings them to our eyes, but does not settle them in our minds, nor in time.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
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
Image
The businessman who is a novelist is able to drop in on literature and feel no suicidal loss of esteem if the lady is not at home, and he can spend his life preparing without fuss for the awful interview.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
Now, practically all reviewers have academic aspirations. The people from the universities are used to a captive audience, but the literary journalist has to please his audience.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
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
Image
[London] is sentimental and tolerant. The attitude to foreigners is like the attitude to dogs: Dogs are neither human nor British, but so long as you keep them under control, give them their exercise, feed them, pat them, you will find their wild emotions are amusing, and their characters interesting.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
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
Image
The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.
V. S. Pritchett