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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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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)
Ruled
Spell
Spells
Since
Language

More quotes by V. S. Pritchett

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Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.
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A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.
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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 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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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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I felt the beginning of a passion, hopeless in the long run, but very nourishing, for identifying myself with people who were not my own, and whose lives were governed by ideas alien to mine.
V. S. Pritchett
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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.
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.
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There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.
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 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.
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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I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.
V. S. Pritchett
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The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.
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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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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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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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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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