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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)
Human
Humans
Tranquility
Stillness
Actions
Beings
Action
Used

More quotes by V. S. Pritchett

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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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I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.
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Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.
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There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.
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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 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.
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Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.
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How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.
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The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.
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A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.
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Some writers thrive on the contact with the commerce of success others are corrupted by it. Perhaps, like losing one's virginity,it is not as bad (or as good) as one feared it was going to be.
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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.
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The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.
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Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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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We do not wish to be better than we are, but more fully what we are.
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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.
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