Quotes from V.S. Pritchett

The secret of happiness is to find a congenial monotony.

Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.

It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.

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

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

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

He (Orwell) always made an impression of the passing traveler who meets one on the station, points out that one is waiting for the wrong train, and vanishes

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

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.

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.

The past of a place survives in its poor.

The law is a tedious profession and is relieves the boredom by its own little comedies

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

You make your own life.

Where one waits for that peremptory, half-melancholy, half-majestic sound of a ship blowing as she silently glides out black in the night, almost through the pub yard, from the docks basin on her voyage.