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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

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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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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 profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.
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Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.
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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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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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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 State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.
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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'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 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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On one plane, the very great writers and the popular romancers of the lower order always meet. They use all of themselves, helplessly, unselectively. They are above the primness and good taste of declining to give themselves away.
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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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It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.
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Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.
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A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.
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A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.
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We do not wish to be better than we are, but more fully what we are.
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Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
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A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.
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