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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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V. S. Pritchett
Age: 96 †
Born: 1900
Born: December 16
Died: 1997
Died: March 20
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University Teacher
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Ipswich (parish)
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More quotes by V. S. Pritchett
I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.
V. S. Pritchett
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.
V. S. Pritchett
The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.
V. S. Pritchett
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
The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.
V. S. Pritchett
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
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.
V. S. Pritchett
Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.
V. S. Pritchett
A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.
V. S. Pritchett
Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.
V. S. Pritchett
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.
V. S. Pritchett
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
A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.
V. S. Pritchett
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
We do not wish to be better than we are, but more fully what we are.
V. S. Pritchett
The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.
V. S. Pritchett
How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.
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.
V. S. Pritchett
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.
V. S. Pritchett
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.
V. S. Pritchett
