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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?
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)
Believe
Emancipating
Unsuccessful
Latest
Experiment
Experiments
Exciting
Mankind
Nature
More quotes by V. S. Pritchett
Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.
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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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A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.
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A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.
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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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A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.
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We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.
V. S. Pritchett
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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Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
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I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.
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The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.
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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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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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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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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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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 businessman who is a novelist is able to drop in on literature and feel no suicidal loss of esteem if the lady is not at home, and he can spend his life preparing without fuss for the awful interview.
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Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.
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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.
V. S. Pritchett
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.
V. S. Pritchett
