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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)
Present
Natural
Yorker
Tense
Native

More quotes by V. S. Pritchett

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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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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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We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.
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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 wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.
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The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.
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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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It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.
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The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
V. S. Pritchett
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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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The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.
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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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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
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Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.
V. S. Pritchett
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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.
V. S. Pritchett
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Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.
V. S. Pritchett
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Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
V. S. Pritchett
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I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.
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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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