Quotes from V. S. Pritchett

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

She was a thinking bosom and one who overpowered her young lovers, all Sybil — a Romantic.

The kingdoms of fantasy and mirth are longlasting and not of this world.

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.

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.

He evoked a Russia which was long dead and gone, lacked the range and urgency of his successors and, unlike these preachers, he was thought of - quite wrongly - as a painter of miniatures and, unfashionably, the pure artist. Yet like Dostoyevsky he believed that 'art must not be burdened with all kinds of aims', that 'without art men might not wish to live on earth', and that 'art will always live man's real life with him'.

At the beginning he saw that the gentry class to which he belonged was prolific in 'superfluous' or unnecessary men who did not pull their weight and he was later to conclude that their character, like his own, contained a continuous struggle between Hamlet's scepticism and Don Quixote's chivalrous and reckless idealism.