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

V. S. Pritchett

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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)
Beings
Action
Used
Human
Humans
Tranquility
Stillness
Actions

More quotes by V. S. Pritchett

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Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
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Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.
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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.
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The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.
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The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.
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Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.
V. S. Pritchett
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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.
V. S. Pritchett
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It is often said that in Ireland there is an excess of genius unsustained by talent but there is talent in the tongues.
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On one plane, the very great writers and the popular romancers of the lower order always meet. They use all of themselves, helplessly, unselectively. They are above the primness and good taste of declining to give themselves away.
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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
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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.
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It is exciting and emancipating to believe we are one of nature's latest experiments, but what if the experiment is unsuccessful?
V. S. Pritchett
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A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.
V. S. Pritchett
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There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.
V. S. Pritchett
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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
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We do not wish to be better than we are, but more fully what we are.
V. S. Pritchett
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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
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The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.
V. S. Pritchett
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The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.
V. S. Pritchett
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One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic potential.
V. S. Pritchett