Quote

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
Biographer
Critic
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Ipswich (parish)
Roles
Quite
Look
Looks
Things
Happenings
World
Happening
Role
Poet

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A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.
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Because of the influence of the cinema, most reports or stories of violence are so pictorial that they lack content or meaning. The camera brings them to our eyes, but does not settle them in our minds, nor in time.
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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.
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We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.
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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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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 natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.
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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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There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.
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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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Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.
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The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.
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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.
V. S. Pritchett
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Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.
V. S. Pritchett
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Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.
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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The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
V. S. Pritchett
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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.
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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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A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.
V. S. Pritchett