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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)
Better
Stark
Human
Bare
Humans
Details
Right
Short
Writing
Unless
Make
Story
Rather
Stories
Starks
More quotes by 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.
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We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.
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It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.
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A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.
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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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The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.
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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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A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.
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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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Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.
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The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
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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 short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.
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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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The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.
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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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It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.
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Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.
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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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Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.
V. S. Pritchett