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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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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)
Story
Shapes
Wit
Experience
Reader
Significance
Art
Short
Dramatic
Hands
Effects
Longing
Wakes
Stories
Novel
Creates
Craving
Answers
Patterns
Pattern
Hand
Shape
Paradox
Beauty
Effect
Primitive

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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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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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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The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.
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We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.
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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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It is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else.
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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.
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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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It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.
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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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How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.
V. S. Pritchett
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Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.
V. S. Pritchett
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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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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
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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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A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.
V. S. Pritchett
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Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.
V. S. Pritchett
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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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Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.
V. S. Pritchett