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The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.

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)
Incessant
Greed
Mark
Activity
Genius
Spiritual
Mind

More quotes by 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.
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All writers - all people - have their stores of private and family legends which lie like a collection of half-forgotten, often violent toys on the floor of memory.
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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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Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
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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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It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.
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The difference between farce and humour in literature is, I suppose, that farce strums louder and louder on one string, while humour varies its note, changes its key, grows and spreads and deepens until it may indeed reach tragic depths.
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A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.
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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.
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The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
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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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We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.
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We do not wish to be better than we are, but more fully what we are.
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[London] is sentimental and tolerant. The attitude to foreigners is like the attitude to dogs: Dogs are neither human nor British, but so long as you keep them under control, give them their exercise, feed them, pat them, you will find their wild emotions are amusing, and their characters interesting.
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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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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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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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A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.
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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.
V. S. Pritchett
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I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.
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