Quote

Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.

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)
Period
Periods
Personality
Disguises
Youth
Insincere
Wells
Personalities
Well
Assumed
Time
Sincerely
Disguise

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Some writers thrive on the contact with the commerce of success others are corrupted by it. Perhaps, like losing one's virginity,it is not as bad (or as good) as one feared it was going to be.
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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 Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.
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A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.
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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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We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.
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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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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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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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How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.
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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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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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We do not wish to be better than we are, but more fully what we are.
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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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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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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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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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It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.
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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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