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

More quotes by V. S. Pritchett

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It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.
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I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.
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Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.
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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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Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.
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The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.
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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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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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The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.
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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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The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
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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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Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
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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.
V. S. Pritchett
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It is the role of the poet to look at what is happening in the world and to know that quite other things are happening.
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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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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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[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.
V. S. Pritchett
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A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.
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