Top 50 V. S. Pritchett Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

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

— V. S. Pritchett

3. “It’s all in the art. You get no credit for living.”

— V. S. Pritchett

4. “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

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

— V. S. Pritchett

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

— V. S. Pritchett

7. “The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.”

— V. S. Pritchett

8. “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

9. “Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.”

— V. S. Pritchett

10. “Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.”

— V. S. Pritchett

11. “Life – how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.”

— V. S. Pritchett

12. “Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.”

— V. S. Pritchett

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

— V. S. Pritchett

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

— V. S. Pritchett

15. “The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.”

— V. S. Pritchett

16. “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

17. “Detective stories are the art-for-art’s sake of yawning Philistinism.”

— V. S. Pritchett

18. “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

19. “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

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

— V. S. Pritchett

21. “The difference between farce and humour in literature is, I suppose, that farce strums louder and louder on one string, while humour varies its note, changes its key, grows and spreads and deepens until it may indeed reach tragic depths.”

— V. S. Pritchett

22. “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

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

— V. S. Pritchett

24. “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

25. “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

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

— V. S. Pritchett

27. “There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.”

— V. S. Pritchett

28. “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

29. “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

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

— V. S. Pritchett

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

— V. S. Pritchett

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

— V. S. Pritchett

33. “As Londoners, we are – you see – drama itself and have no reason to whip ourselves up into states with sirens and altercations. We like the police to be quiet, the ambulances discreet, and the fire engines jolly.”

— V. S. Pritchett

34. “A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.”

— V. S. Pritchett

35. “It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.”

— V. S. Pritchett

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

— V. S. Pritchett

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

— V. S. Pritchett

38. “Queen Victoria – a mixture of national landlady and actress.”

— V. S. Pritchett

39. “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

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

— V. S. Pritchett

41. “The men vanish, but toasts, prayers – and property – remains.”

— V. S. Pritchett

42. “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

43. “If Ivan was thought of as an evasive, irresolute and will-less man in later years, one has to suppose that his mother had broken his will.”

— V. S. Pritchett

44. “We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.”

— V. S. Pritchett

45. “I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.”

— V. S. Pritchett

46. “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

47. “Your successes were never due to your brains. You achieved them because you have “character.”

— V. S. Pritchett

48. “One is inclined to add only one emollient sentence: that whoever you are and whatever you have done, you will be reversed if you reach old age, for then you will look like a hard old walnut or like some beatified infant of boundless cynicism – the London ideas of innocence. You will look so sweet that you will be able to get away with anything.”

— V. S. Pritchett

49. “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

50. “The law is a tedious profession and is relieves the boredom by its own little comedies.”

— V. S. Pritchett