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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)
Stories
Starks
Better
Stark
Human
Bare
Humans
Details
Right
Short
Writing
Unless
Make
Story
Rather
More quotes by V. S. Pritchett
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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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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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We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.
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Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.
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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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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.
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Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.
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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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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 is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else.
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I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.
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Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.
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A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.
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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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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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[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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