V. S. Pritchett Quotes
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The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
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There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.
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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.
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The difference between farce and humour in literature is, I suppose, that farce strums louder and louder on one string, while humour varies its note, changes its key, grows and spreads and deepens until it may indeed reach tragic depths.
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The novel...creates a bemusing effect. The short story, on the other hand wakes the reader up. Not only that, it answers the primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience.
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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.
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Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.
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The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.
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We do not wish to be better than we are, but more fully what we are.
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Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.
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The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.
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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.
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Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.
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A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.
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The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.
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Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.
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Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.
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It is often said that in Ireland there is an excess of genius unsustained by talent; but there is talent in the tongues.
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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.
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Now, practically all reviewers have academic aspirations. The people from the universities are used to a captive audience, but the literary journalist has to please his audience.
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On one plane, the very great writers and the popular romancers of the lower order always meet. They use all of themselves, helplessly, unselectively. They are above the primness and good taste of declining to give themselves away.
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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.
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One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic potential.
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It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.
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The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.
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It is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else.
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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.
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The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.
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[London] is sentimental and tolerant. The attitude to foreigners is like the attitude to dogs: Dogs are neither human nor British, but so long as you keep them under control, give them their exercise, feed them, pat them, you will find their wild emotions are amusing, and their characters interesting.
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Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious piety and parlour game.
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