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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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The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.
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The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
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The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.
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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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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 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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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.
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A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.
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The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.
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Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.
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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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How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.
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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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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 profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.
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A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.
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Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.
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Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.
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.
V. S. Pritchett