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Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.

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)
Men
Mausoleum
Inactive
Armchairs
Masculinity
Prefer
Places
Women

More quotes by V. S. Pritchett

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All writers - all people - have their stores of private and family legends which lie like a collection of half-forgotten, often violent toys on the floor of memory.
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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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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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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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Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.
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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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Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.
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The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
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It is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else.
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The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.
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I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.
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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.
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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 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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