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

More quotes by V. S. Pritchett

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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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Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.
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It is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else.
V. S. Pritchett
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I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.
V. S. Pritchett
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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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A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.
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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.
V. S. Pritchett
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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.
V. S. Pritchett
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The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
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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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.
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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The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.
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?
V. S. Pritchett
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The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.
V. S. Pritchett
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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.
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.
V. S. Pritchett
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The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.
V. S. Pritchett
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The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.
V. S. Pritchett
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It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.
V. S. Pritchett