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The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.

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)
Responsive
Profoundly
Hopeless
Humorous
Writers
Life
Uncouth

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The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.
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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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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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Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.
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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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[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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How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.
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The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.
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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.
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Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.
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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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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 well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else.
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The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
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I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.
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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 peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.
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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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A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.
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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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