V.S. Pritchett > Quotes

“Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind. ”
― V.S. Pritchett

“It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.”
― V.S. Pritchett

“on short stories:

something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.”
― V.S. Pritchett

“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”
― V.S. Pritchett

“I have been an elated reader of all the great Russian novelists and short-story writers since my early twenties and I have often written about them, though I know no Russian and have never been to Russia. The lure for me (I realize now) lay in John Bayley’s wonderful phrase—I believe in his learned introduction to Pushkin’s Letters—that the “doors of the Russian house are wide open”: we see people who speak out in the lost hours of the day as it passes through them.”
― V.S. Pritchett, Chekhov: A Biography

“Your successes were never due to your brains. You achieved them because you have “character.”
― V.S. Pritchett, London Perceived

“Life—how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.”
― V.S. Pritchett, Midnight Oil

“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

“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, London Perceived

“The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.”
― V.S. Pritchett

“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, London Perceived

“In no other city can one so cheerfully enjoy the accidents of bad art.”
― V.S. Pritchett

“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

“You make your own life.”
― V.S. Pritchett

“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

“The men vanish, but toasts, prayers - and property – remains.”
― V.S. Pritchett, London Perceived

“It’s all in the art. You get no credit for living.”
― V.S. Pritchett

“The law is a tedious profession and is relieves the boredom by its own little comedies”
― V.S. Pritchett, London Perceived

“on short stories:

"...something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.”
― V.S. Pritchett

“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'.”
― V. S. Pritchett

“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.”
― V. S. Pritchett

“One does not pity the people of the town, nor does one hate them. One says, 'they did it to us', but one is left just staring. The scene has gone beyond argument. The terrible thing is that one has no feeling at all ... One is stripped of every feeling, the humane and the inhumane, and curiosity grows feeble. This is negation. The mind and heart have got to begin at the beginning again and learn all they knew once more.”
― V. S. Pritchett

“Marietta was one of those large suburban houses which no family can now afford to occupy. It suggested a personage rather than a house, a minor royalty in flannels. There was so much collar and shirt-front of white balcony. There were top windows like eyes pouched by late rich dining, lower windows like a pair of bellies, the red face whiskered with creepers, the portico enlarged like a drinker's nose.”
― V.S. Pritchett, Mr. Beluncle

“What do you think of life?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing?"
"Nothing. When one eats well, good. When one eats badly- well, good too. One remains living until one is put into the ground. Then nothing, man- nothing." p145”
― V.S. Pritchett, The Spanish Temper

“The past of a place survives in its poor.”
― V.S. Pritchett

“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.”
― V.S. Pritchett

“The Spaniards, who had become, by centuries of war, the knights of the new order and the purified faith, the superb conquistadors who founded the nations of America, had by a tragic retribution unfitted themselves for the rational tasks of civilization. They could conquer, win treasure, keep the faith, but not work. The humanism of the Renaissance had seemed weakness to them, the rebellion of the Reformation had seemed impiety- though it resembled their own effort to reform a pagan Church. They fought to preserve, and for a long time successfully preserved, the spirit of the Middle Ages. It was their triumph, their distinction, and their tragedy. p59”
― V.S. Pritchett, The Spanish Temper

“No Victorian novel approaches Middlemarch in its width of reference, its intellectual power, or the imperturbable spaciousness of its narrative... I doubt if any Victorian novelist has as much to teach the modern novelists as George Eliot.”
― V.S. Pritchett, The Living Novel