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A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.

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)
Yorker
Tense
Native
Present
Natural

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A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.
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I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.
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Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.
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We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.
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Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.
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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.
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It is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else.
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The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.
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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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Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.
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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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The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.
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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.
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Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.
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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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Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.
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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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It is exciting and emancipating to believe we are one of nature's latest experiments, but what if the experiment is unsuccessful?
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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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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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