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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)
Experiments
Exciting
Mankind
Nature
Emancipating
Believe
Unsuccessful
Latest
Experiment

More quotes by V. S. Pritchett

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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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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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It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.
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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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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 makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
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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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I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.
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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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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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Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.
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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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A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.
V. S. Pritchett
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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.
V. S. Pritchett
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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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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
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Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.
V. S. Pritchett
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We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.
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How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.
V. S. Pritchett
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The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.
V. S. Pritchett