Vs Pritchett Quotes & Sayings

Because the difference between a friend and a real friend is that you and the real friend come from the same territory, of the same place deep inside you, and that means you see the world in the same kind of way. You know each other even before you do. — Laura Pritchett

Until I test the limits to what I can achieve, I won't really know how well I can do. — Price Pritchett

The legal system doesn't always serve as a good guide for your conscience. You can step way over the ethical line and still be inside the law. The same thing goes for rules, policies and procedures - you know, the organization's "internal laws." You can "go by the book" and still behave unethically. Still not move beyond mediocrity. High standards-the ethics of excellence-come to life through your basic values, your character, integrity and honesty. Obeying the law is the bare minimum. — Price Pritchett

Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story. — V.S. Pritchett

There is more magic in sin if it is not committed. — V.S. Pritchett

On one plane, the very great writers and the popular romancers of the lower order always meet. They use all of themselves, helplessly, unselectively. They are above the primness and good taste of declining to give themselves away. — V.S. Pritchett

I felt the beginning of a passion, hopeless in the long run, but very nourishing, for identifying myself with people who were not my own, and whose lives were governed by ideas alien to mine. — V.S. Pritchett

The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists. — V.S. Pritchett

If you're experiencing no anxiety or discomfort, the risk you're taking probably isn't worthy of you. The only risks that aren't a little scary are the ones you've outgrown. — Price Pritchett

You have to get beyond blaming others ... give up your excuses ... stand responsible for what you do ... ultimately, ethics ends up an individual exercise. — Price Pritchett

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

It is exciting and emancipating to believe we are one of nature's latest experiments, but what if the experiment is unsuccessful? — V.S. Pritchett

The secret of happiness is to find a congenial monotony. — V.S. Pritchett

I have always felt a special affinity with V. S. Pritchett. He worked from the ear, primarily, as I do, and he was an all-rounder, writing short stories, novels, memoir, travelogue, critical biography. He lived to be almost 100, and he never stopped, and his work is unified by a great generosity of spirit. — Kevin Barry

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. — V.S. Pritchett

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. — V.S. Pritchett

Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress. — V.S. Pritchett

And isn't it funny how if one person speaks for real, then the other person can too? We just did that. We just became friends. It's just a matter of finding the right person and crossing that barrier together, almost like you're holding hands, but really you're holding the most tender place inside you. — Laura Pritchett

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. — V.S. Pritchett

The businessman who is a novelist is able to drop in on literature and feel no suicidal loss of esteem if the lady is not at home, and he can spend his life preparing without fuss for the awful interview. — V.S. Pritchett

Give people, including yourself, clear permission to make mistakes ... and to fix the problems. Since nobody's perfect, mistakes should be allowed. Cover-ups shouldn't. Cover-ups create twice the trouble. — Price Pritchett

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. — V.S. Pritchett

When you can make it this simple, though, just do the right thing. Even if you could get away with less. Even when other people are doing the wrong thing. Even though the wrong thing seems like no big deal. — Price Pritchett

Art is what gets us beyond what is real. It makes reality more real. It also shortens the distance we gotta travel to see how connected we are. — Laura Pritchett

It is the role of the poet to look at what is happening in the world and to know that quite other things are happening. — V.S. Pritchett

Your ethical muscle grows stronger every time you choose right over wrong. — Price Pritchett

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

No sense being pessimistic. Wouldn't work anyway. — Price Pritchett

A short story is ... frequently the celebration of character at bursting point. — V.S. Pritchett