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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

More quotes by V. S. Pritchett

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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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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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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.
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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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Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.
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The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.
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The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.
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The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.
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We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.
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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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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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I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.
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A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.
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A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.
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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?
V. S. Pritchett
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How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.
V. S. Pritchett
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One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic potential.
V. S. Pritchett
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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
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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.
V. S. Pritchett