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Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.
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)
Stories
Philistinism
Yawning
Detective
Detectives
Sake
Art
More quotes by 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
How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.
V. S. Pritchett
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.
V. S. Pritchett
I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.
V. S. Pritchett
I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.
V. S. Pritchett
It is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else.
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
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
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
Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.
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
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
The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.
V. S. Pritchett
I felt the beginning of a passion, hopeless in the long run, but very nourishing, for identifying myself with people who were not my own, and whose lives were governed by ideas alien to mine.
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
It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.
V. S. Pritchett
Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.
V. S. Pritchett
The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
V. S. Pritchett
Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.
V. S. Pritchett
Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.
V. S. Pritchett
