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The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
V. S. Pritchett
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V. S. Pritchett
Age: 96 †
Born: 1900
Born: December 16
Died: 1997
Died: March 20
Biographer
Critic
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Ipswich (parish)
Good
Makers
Novelists
Rarely
Short
Story
Stories
Writing
More quotes by V. S. Pritchett
Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.
V. S. Pritchett
Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.
V. S. Pritchett
It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.
V. S. Pritchett
The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.
V. S. Pritchett
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.
V. S. Pritchett
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.
V. S. Pritchett
The businessman who is a novelist is able to drop in on literature and feel no suicidal loss of esteem if the lady is not at home, and he can spend his life preparing without fuss for the awful interview.
V. S. Pritchett
The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.
V. S. Pritchett
There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.
V. S. Pritchett
The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.
V. S. Pritchett
Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
V. S. Pritchett
Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.
V. S. Pritchett
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.
V. S. Pritchett
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.
V. S. Pritchett
A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.
V. S. Pritchett
Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.
V. S. Pritchett
Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.
V. S. Pritchett
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.
V. S. Pritchett
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.
V. S. Pritchett
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.
V. S. Pritchett
