Quote

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)
Foreign
English
Evidence
Talk
Love
Like
Superstition
Superstitions
Peculiar

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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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The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.
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The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.
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The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.
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I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.
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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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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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[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.
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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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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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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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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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A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.
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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 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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Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
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I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.
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