72 Quotes by V. S. Pritchett

Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.

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

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

[London is] like the sight of a heavy sea from a rowing boat in the middle of the Atlantic.... One lives in it, afloat but half submerged in a heavy flood of brick, stone, asphalt, slate, steel, glass, concrete, and tarmac, seeing nothing fixable beyond a few score white spires that splash up like spits of foam above the next glum wave of dirty buildings.

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

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

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

We do not wish to be better than we are, but more fully what we are.

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.