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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
The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.
V. S. Pritchett
Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.
V. S. Pritchett
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
It is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else.
V. S. Pritchett
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
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
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
Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
V. S. Pritchett
Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.
V. S. Pritchett
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
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
Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.
V. S. Pritchett
It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.
V. S. Pritchett
It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.
V. S. Pritchett
The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.
V. S. Pritchett
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
A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.
V. S. Pritchett
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
The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
V. S. Pritchett
[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
