V.S. Pritchett Quotes

Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious piety and parlour game.

The men vanish, but toasts, prayers - and property – remains.

Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.

The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.

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.

The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.

Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.

Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.

The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.

Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.

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.

There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.

I have been an elated reader of all the great Russian novelists and short-story writers since my early twenties and I have often written about them, though I know no Russian and have never been to Russia. The lure for me (I realize now) lay in John Bayley's wonderful phrase - I believe in his learned introduction to Pushkin's Letters - that the "doors of the Russian house are wide open": we see people who speak out in the lost hours of the day as it passes through them.

In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.

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.

On short stories:
something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.

It is exciting and emancipating to believe we are one of nature's latest experiments, but what if the experiment is unsuccessful?

[London is] like the sight of a heavy sea from a rowing boat in the middle of the Atlantic ... One lives in it, afloat but half submerged in a heavy flood of brick, stone, asphalt, slate, steel, glass, concrete, and tarmac, seeing nothing fixable beyond a few score white spires that splash up like spits of foam above the next glum wave of dirty buildings.

One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic potential.

In no other city can one so cheerfully enjoy the accidents of bad art.

[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.

I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.

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.

How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.

Life - how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.

A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.

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

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.

The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.

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.

Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.

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.