Quotes from V. S. Pritchett

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.

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?

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.

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

The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.

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

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

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

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

The secret of happiness is to find a congenial monotony.

I come from a set of storytellers and moralists…. The storytellers were forever changing the tale and the moralists tampering with it in order to put it in an edifying light.

Our laughter is only a note or two short of a scream of fear.