Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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)
People
Beginning
Nourishing
Whose
Identifying
Passion
Governed
Lives
Alien
Felt
Hopeless
Running
Aliens
Ideas
Mines
Long
Mine

More quotes by V. S. Pritchett

Image
Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
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
Image
Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
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.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
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
Image
A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
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
Image
There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
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
Image
It is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.
V. S. Pritchett