Pritchett Quotes

Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story. ~ V.S. Pritchett

How can we be trusted with big things if we're not trustworthy with things that are small? Don't allow your finer instincts to become a casualty of the little everyday crimes of ethical compromise. ~ Price Pritchett

Notice that "I" is at the center of the word "ethical." There is no "they." Achieving the ethics of excellence is our individual assignment. ~ Price Pritchett

Art is what gets us beyond what is real. It makes reality more real. It also shortens the distance we gotta travel to see how connected we are. ~ Laura Pritchett

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. ~ V.S. Pritchett

Excellence calls for character ... integrity ... fairness ... honesty ... a determination to do what's right. High ethical standards, across the board. ~ Price Pritchett

Narrow life down to what's precious and necessary. In a world of complexity the best weapon is simplicity. ~ Price Pritchett

High personal standards aren't enough for organizational excellence. You've got to be intolerant of low standards in others ... If you accommodate questionable practices in others who touch your organization, you risk soiling its reputation. Anybody whose hands aren't clean can get the place dirty. ~ Price Pritchett

Ethical dilemmas have a way of sneaking up on a person. If something smells funny, stay away from it. Or help get rid of it. ~ Price Pritchett

Reading someone's poetry is like seeing them naked" -Davis Pritchett ~ John Green

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

Excellence is a process, not just an outcome. Sure, we have to hold out for high standards in the products or services we provide. The goods must be more than "good enough." But so must our approach - you know, our methodology, the way we do business and deal with people. How could the ends be considered excellent if we can't be proud of the means? ~ Price Pritchett

Optimism inspires, energizes, and brings out our best. It points the mind toward possibilities and helps us think creatively past problems. ~ Price Pritchett

There's a lot more to be gained from being grateful than you might think. Managing your outlook towards appreciation and thankfulness feeds the soul. It brings calm and contentment. It lifts your levels of happiness and hope. Gratitude will amplify your positive recollections about times past, and in turn sets the stage for optimism about the future. ~ Price Pritchett

No sense being pessimistic. Wouldn't work anyway. ~ Price Pritchett

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

In no other city can one so cheerfully enjoy the accidents of bad art. ~ V.S. Pritchett

Tell ya what I'm gonna do, see. I'm not going to hope. Now, you don't either. Don't hope your life will get better. Just make it so. Don't hope you are able to handle this baby. Just do it. Just be glad, just move fast, just do what you need to do. But for god's sake, don't hope. Just be...Just be... ~ Laura Pritchett

The men vanish, but toasts, prayers - and property – remains. ~ V.S. Pritchett

As tough as it sometimes looks on the front end, it's easier to do right than undo wrong. ~ Price Pritchett

The question is, when so many others cut corners, shave the truth, self-deal, believe in the fast buck, and follow the crowd along the low road of least resistance, can we even afford to travel the high road of ethical behavior? Frankly, we can't afford anything else. Any other competitive angle is a pure crapshoot in today's business world. Companies with shaky ethics and shabby standards will be crippled as they try to compete in our changing world. ~ Price Pritchett

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

When you see people with "the right stuff," those who choose the right over the wrong or the "iffy," let them know you're proud of them. Encourage the courageous, so they'll have the will to carry on. ~ Price Pritchett

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

But when we get enough people who don't care, and who don't accept personal responsibility for high ethical standards, our organization gets the "M" disease. Mediocrity. Anybody in the place can be a carrier. By the same token, every individual can carry the cure: the ethics of excellence. ~ Price Pritchett

We all faced painful ethical challenges before we even knew how to spell our names. There were tough choices. Tradeoffs. Confusing signals regarding how to live one's life. And here we are now, today, still struggling. Still trying to sort things out. Still trying to work our way through life effectively. About the only thing that has changed is the scope of the problem. There's more at stake now. And we're in a position, as grownups, to do a lot more-good or bad-for ourselves, our organization, our world. But we still must wrestle with our imperfect ethics. ~ Price 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

People said it because other people said it. They did not know why it was being said and heard everywhere. They did not give or ask for reasons. 'Reason,' Dr. Pritchett had told them, 'is the most naive of all superstitions.'
'The source of public opinion?' said Claude Slagenhop in a public radio speech. 'There is no source of public opinion. It is spontaneously general. It is a reflex of the collective instinct of the collective mind. ~ Ayn Rand

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. ~ V.S. Pritchett

The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed. ~ V.S. Pritchett

When you can make it this simple, though, just do the right thing. Even if you could get away with less. Even when other people are doing the wrong thing. Even though the wrong thing seems like no big deal. ~ Price Pritchett

We can't win the struggle for high standards if we just talk a good game ... we've got to play a good game. ~ Price Pritchett

I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30. ~ V.S. Pritchett

In these times of self-directed teams, empowered employees, and "boundaryless" organizations, your worth as an individual employee will also get measured by your work group's collective results. ~ Price Pritchett

The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive. ~ V.S. Pritchett

The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists. ~ V.S. Pritchett

Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind. ~ V.S. Pritchett

The ethics of excellence are grounded in action - what you actually do, rather than what you say you believe. Talk, as the saying goes, is cheap. ~ Price 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

Too much attention on problems kills our faith in possibilities. ~ Price Pritchett

I think humans are only capable of small moments of honesty. Then they get tired and back away. It's something to foster, this ability to keep it for longer. How to keep being honest and aware. ~ Laura Pritchett

There is more magic in sin if it is not committed. ~ V.S. Pritchett

Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women. ~ V.S. Pritchett

Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism. ~ V.S. Pritchett

We can't achieve excellence through talent alone. Or merely by making technological improvements. We can't even buy our way to excellence, no matter how much money we have available to spend. More dollars will never do it. We have to develop a strong corporate conscience. Ethical muscle. And that doesn't happen by accident either. ~ Price Pritchett

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

The only way we can develop muscle is through regular exercise. As soon as we stop stretching and working toward higher ethics, our standards start to sag. The muscle gets soft, and instead of excellence we have to settle for mediocrity. Maybe something even worse. ~ Price Pritchett

If you're unwilling to defer pleasure or endure some "pain" for now, are you likely to end up later deep in the hole? ~ Price Pritchett

A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense. ~ V.S. Pritchett

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. ~ V.S. Pritchett

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. ~ V.S. Pritchett

You got to start thinking, and you've got to let go of the idea that you're something special to somebody, because none of us are, and if you don't, if you don't stop dreaming about that, you're going to end up all snap-snap-snapped to pieces. ~ Laura Pritchett

"You, who are on the road, must have a code that you can live by-"* You'll find universal agreement on the value of a behavior code, on the need for some sort of ethical system. Even the crooks count on "honor among thieves," and countries actually wage war according to certain rules. On the job and in the rest of our day-to-day living, we each need a "code for the road." ~ Price Pritchett

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. ~ V.S. Pritchett

quietness has a strange, buzzing hum that can nearly break you apart. ~ Laura Pritchett

You have to get beyond blaming others ... give up your excuses ... stand responsible for what you do ... ultimately, ethics ends up an individual exercise. ~ Price Pritchett

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

Your ethical muscle grows stronger every time you choose right over wrong. ~ Price Pritchett

[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. ~ V.S. Pritchett

Your doubts are not the product of accurate thinking, but habitual thinking. Years ago you excepted flawed conclusions as correct, begin to live your life as if those warped ideas about your potential were true, and ceased the bold experiment in living that brought you many breakthrough behaviors as a child. ~ Price Pritchett

On short stories:
something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing. ~ V.S. Pritchett

Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress. ~ V.S. Pritchett

Force yourself to use the optimist's explanatory style: 'The situation is temporary. The effect will be limited, not pervasive. And it's due to external causes.' If you just can't make that work for you, refocus your attention ... Turn your attention in a totally different direction for the time being. Replace the distressing thoughts with other ideas. Distract yourself. ~ Price Pritchett

Until I test the limits to what I can achieve, I won't really know how well I can do. ~ Price 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

If you can't get what you want, you end up doing something else, just to get some relief. Just to keep from going crazy. Because when you're sad enough, you look for ways to fill you up. ~ Laura Pritchett

Live according to the ethics of excellence, and you can always stand proud. Pride - not vanity, but dignity and self-respect - should carry a lot of weight in helping you make decisions. Let pride help you decide. ~ Price Pritchett

Perhaps more surprising, even the rich in developing countries also lag. For example, in Indonesia, the richest quintile has scores around 450--less than the 500 for the poorest quintile in Korea or the same as the poorest quintile in UK. So in poor countries, the richest are still getting a mediocre education, and the poor cannot be said to be getting any education at all. ~ Lant Pritchett

When you hold out for high standards, people are impressed-but they don't always like you for it. Not everybody will be on your side in your struggle to do what's right and ethical. In fact, sometimes even you won't be on your side. You'll wrestle with inner conflict, torn between what you should do and what you want to do. You'll also aggravate other people. Seems when you walk the straight and narrow you always step on someone's toes. Don't count on the ethics of excellence to make you popular. ~ Price Pritchett