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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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Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
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 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.
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.
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.
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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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Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.
V. S. Pritchett
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Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.
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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Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.
V. S. Pritchett
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The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.
V. S. Pritchett
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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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It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.
V. S. Pritchett
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A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.
V. S. Pritchett
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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.
V. S. Pritchett
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We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.
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.
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 very important to feel foreign. I was born in England, but when I'm being a writer, everyone in England is foreign to me.
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