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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.
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)
Order
Planes
Give
Lower
Giving
Popular
Great
Writers
Good
Meet
Always
Taste
Helplessly
Use
Declining
Away
Plane
More quotes by V. S. Pritchett
The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.
V. S. Pritchett
It is often said that in Ireland there is an excess of genius unsustained by talent but there is talent in the tongues.
V. S. Pritchett
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.
V. S. Pritchett
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.
V. S. Pritchett
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
Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.
V. S. Pritchett
A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.
V. S. Pritchett
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
It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.
V. S. Pritchett
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.
V. S. Pritchett
Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.
V. S. Pritchett
Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.
V. S. Pritchett
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
[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.
V. S. Pritchett
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.
V. S. Pritchett
It's very important to feel foreign. I was born in England, but when I'm being a writer, everyone in England is foreign to me.
V. S. Pritchett
Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
V. S. Pritchett
Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.
V. S. Pritchett
I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.
V. S. Pritchett
How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.
V. S. Pritchett
