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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)
Experiment
Experiments
Exciting
Mankind
Nature
Believe
Emancipating
Unsuccessful
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There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.
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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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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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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.
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.
V. S. Pritchett
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A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.
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It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.
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Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.
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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.
V. S. Pritchett
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A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.
V. S. Pritchett
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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.
V. S. Pritchett
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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 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.
V. S. Pritchett
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The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.
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.
V. S. Pritchett
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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.
V. S. Pritchett
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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.
V. S. Pritchett
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It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.
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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Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.
V. S. Pritchett