V. S. Pritchett

"Yes, well I had all my serious illnesses in late middle age. And now Im just stuck, Im afraid."

"Its very important to feel foreign. I was born in England, but when Im being a writer, everyone in England is foreign to me."

"I found people were telling stories to themselves without knowing it. It seemed to me that people were living a sort of small sermon that they believed in, but at the same time it was a fairy tale. Selfish desires, along with one or two highly suspect elevated thoughts. They secretly regard themselves as works of art, valuable in themselves."

"The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it."

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

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

"In her businesslike way she thought that her life had begun when she was a very young woman and she really did look lovely: you knew it wouldnt last and you packed all you could into it — but men were different. A man like B — like Alfie, too — never got beyond the time when they were boys and, damn them, it kept them young."

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

"Because of the influence of the cinema, most reports or stories of violence are so pictorial that they lack content or meaning. The camera brings them to our eyes, but does not settle them in our minds, nor in time."

"One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic potential."

"Wilson was not, in the academic sense, a scholar or historian. He was an enormous reader, one of those readers who are perpetually on the scent from book to book. He was the old-style man of letters, but galvanized and with the iron of purpose in him."

"There is more magic in sin if it is not committed."