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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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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)
Evidence
Talk
Love
Like
Superstition
Superstitions
Peculiar
Foreign
English

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Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.
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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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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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Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.
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Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.
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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 profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.
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The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.
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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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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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Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.
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Among the masked dandies of Edwardian comedy, Max Beerbohm is the most happily armored by a deep and almost innocent love of himself as a work of art.
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I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.
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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.
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Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.
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It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.
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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 State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.
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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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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.
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