V.S. Pritchett Quotes

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

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

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 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.

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

Some writers thrive on the contact with the commerce of success; others are corrupted by it. Perhaps, like losing one's virginity,it is not as bad (or as good) as one feared it was going to be.

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

The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.

We do not wish to be better than we are, but more fully what we are.

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

The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.

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

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

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.

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

Optimism is a much more enabling mindset than hard-core realism, and it's far superior to pessimism...[because] Hope helps move us in the direction of our goals and ambitions.

A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.

It is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else.

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

Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.

It is often said that in Ireland there is an excess of genius unsustained by talent; but there is talent in the tongues.

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

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

The secret of happiness is to find a congenial monotony.

The principle of procrastinated rape is said to be the ruling one in all the great bestsellers.

The State that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.

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

Only in a place like this do earth and sky come together in such a way that they bridge into one, and in such a place a person could put up her arms and find herself in heaven.

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.

And I bet it's harder than people think, isn't it? Everything looks so simple from a distance. Then, the more you look, the more you see. And that's when you have to rise to the challenge.

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.