Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett CH CBE (also known as VSP; 16 December 1900 – 20 March 1997), was a British writer and literary critic.
There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.
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.
Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.
It is often said that in Ireland there is an excess of genius unsustained by talent; but there is talent in the tongues.
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.
Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.
A short story is. . . frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.
Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.
We do not wish to be better than we are, but more fully what we are.
The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.
A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.
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.
The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.
One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic potential.
The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.
Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.
The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.
[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.
It is exciting and emancipating to believe we are one of nature's latest experiments, but what if the experiment is unsuccessful?
Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.