V. S. Pritchett
V. S. Pritchett
Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett CH CBE, was a British writer and literary critic...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth16 December 1900
talking two well-known
It is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else.
important england born
It's very important to feel foreign. I was born in England, but when I'm being a writer, everyone in England is foreign to me.
people academic used
Now, practically all reviewers have academic aspirations. The people from the universities are used to a captive audience, but the literary journalist has to please his audience.
school eye museums
Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious piety and parlour game.
magic sin committed
There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.
past remember edges
The present has its élan because it is always on the edge of the unknown and one misunderstands the past unless one remembers that this unknown was once part of its nature.
commitment america evil
Absolute Evil is not the kingdom of hell. The inhabitants of hell are ourselves, i.e., those who pay our painful, embarrassing, humanistic duties to society and who are compromised by our intellectually dubious commitment to virtue, which can be defined by the perpetual smear-word of French polemic: the bourgeois. (Bourgeois equals humanist.) This word has long been anathema in France where categories are part of the ruling notion of logique. The word cannot be readily matched in England or America.
eye mind cinema
Because of the influence of the cinema, most reports or stories of violence are so pictorial that they lack content or meaning. The camera brings them to our eyes, but does not settle them in our minds, nor in time.
art men enough
Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.
losing thrive contact
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.
self creative emotion
One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic potential.
memories lying people
All writers - all people - have their stores of private and family legends which lie like a collection of half-forgotten, often violent toys on the floor of memory.
art credit
It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.
guilt sin feels
How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.