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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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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)
Edge
Tales
Edges
Touch
Gives
Science
Bogus
Giving
Superstitious
Even
Tale

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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.
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There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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We do not wish to be better than we are, but more fully what we are.
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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 is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.
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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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How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.
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Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
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Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.
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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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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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Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.
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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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A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.
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