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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.

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)
Humans
Details
Right
Short
Writing
Unless
Make
Story
Rather
Stories
Starks
Better
Stark
Human
Bare

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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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How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.
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Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.
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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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We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.
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Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.
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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.
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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.
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Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.
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There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.
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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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[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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It is exciting and emancipating to believe we are one of nature's latest experiments, but what if the experiment is unsuccessful?
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A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.
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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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I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.
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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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Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.
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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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The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.
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