V. S. PRITCHETT

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

Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.

The secret of happiness is to find a congenial monotony.

Life - how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.

In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.

The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.

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.

Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.

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.

I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.

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.

[London] is sentimental and tolerant. 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.

We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.

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.

Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.

The difference between farce and humour in literature is, I suppose, that farce strums louder and louder on one string, while humour varies its note, changes its key, grows and spreads and deepens until it may indeed reach tragic depths.

Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.

The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.

I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.

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.

It is often said that in Ireland there is an excess of genius unsustained by talent; but there is talent in the tongues.

Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.

Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.

Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.