CBE
(16 December 1900 - 20 March 1997), was a British writer and critic. He was particularly known for his short stories, collected in a number of volumes. His most famous nonfiction works are the memoirs A Cab at the Door (1968) and Midnight Oil (1971), and his many collections of essays on literary biography and criticism.
Victor Sawdon Pritchett was born in Ipswich
, Suffolk
, the first of four children of Walter Sawdon Pritchett and Beatrice Helena (née Martin).
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 wouldn't 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.
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.
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.
Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.