V.S. Pritchett Quotes

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.

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.

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

Optimism inspires, energizes, and brings out our best. It points the mind toward possibilities and helps us think creatively past problems.

Most people confuse wishing and wanting with pursuing. You must place your trust in action.

No sense being pessimistic. Wouldn't work anyway.

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

Too much attention on problems kills our faith in possibilities.

Excellence calls for character . . . integrity . . . fairness . . . honesty . . . a determination to do what's right. High ethical standards, across the board.

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

If you must doubt something, doubt your limits.

Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.

So let your deepest desires direct your aim. Set your sights far above the 'reasonable' target. The power of purpose is profound only if you have a desire that stirs the heart.

We can't win the struggle for high standards if we just talk a good game . . . we've got to play a good game.

Trust is the glue that holds relationships together.

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.

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

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.

If you can't get what you want, you end up doing something else, just to get some relief. Just to keep from going crazy. Because when you're sad enough, you look for ways to fill you up.

Ethical dilemmas have a way of sneaking up on a person. If something smells funny, stay away from it. Or help get rid of it.

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

In these times of self-directed teams, empowered employees, and "boundaryless" organizations, your worth as an individual employee will also get measured by your work group's collective results.

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

We've got to start thinking of school as a lifelong process. That's the only way we'll keep abreast and be able to share in the wealth of the new "knowledge society."

We need timeless principles to steer by in running our organizations and building our personal careers. We need high standards --- the ethics of excellence.

If you become a giver, you'll make them feel like they want to reciprocate.

A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.

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.

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

Everybody makes honest mistakes, but there's no such thing as an honest cover-up.

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

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

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

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.

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

You carve out the organization's character through your daily choices. You shape its conscience as you exercise your own.

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.

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

Act as if success is certain.

The world behaves differently when I take action to go after what I want.

The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.

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.

How can we be trusted with big things if we're not trustworthy with things that are small? Don't allow your finer instincts to become a casualty of the little everyday crimes of ethical compromise.

Narrow life down to what's precious and necessary. In a world of complexity the best weapon is simplicity.

You can't put someone else in charge of your morals. Ethics is a personal discipline.

Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.

A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.

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

It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.

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.