V S Pritchett Quotes

Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.

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

But what a horrible world 'society' is.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The novel tends to tell us everything,’ wrote V.S. Pritchett in his introduction to the Oxford Book of Short Stories, ‘whereas the short story tells us only one thing, and that, intensely’.

V.S. Pritchett's definition of a short story is 'something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.' Notice the 'glimpse' part of this. First the glimpse. Then the glimpse gives life, turned into something that illuminates the moment and may, if we're lucky -- that word again -- have even further ranging consequences and meaning. The short story writer's task is to invest the glimpse with all that is in his power. He'll bring his intelligence and literary skill to bear (his talent), his sense of proportion and sense of the fitness of things: of how things out there really are and how he sees those things -- like no one else sees them. And this is done through the use of clear and specific language, language used so as to bring to life the details that will light up the story for the reader. For the details to be concrete and convey meaning, the language must be accurate and precisely given. The words can be so precise they may even sound flat, but they can still carry; if used right they can hit all the notes.

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

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.

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

The men vanish, but toasts, prayers - and property – remains.

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.

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.

You make your own life.

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

The past of a place survives in its poor.

V. S. Pritchett has a challenging aside in which he describes Jane Austen as a war novelist, pointing out that the facts of the long war are basic to all her books.

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'.

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.

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.

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.

Compiling these entries, I kept in mind a passage from a 1941 essay by V. S. Pritchett. Writing about Edward Gibbon, Pritchett takes note of the great English historian’s remarkable industry—even during his military service, Gibbon managed to find the time to continue his scholarly work, toting along Horace on the march and reading up on pagan and Christian theology in his tent. “Sooner or later,” Pritchett writes, “the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.

Compiling these entries, I kept in mind a passage from a 1941 essay by V. S. Pritchett. Writing about Edward Gibbon, Pritchett takes note of the great English historian’s remarkable industry—even during his military service, Gibbon managed to find the time to continue his scholarly work, toting along Horace on the march and reading up on pagan and Christian theology in his tent. “Sooner or later,” Pritchett writes, “the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.