Quote

The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.

V. S. Pritchett

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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)
Autobiography
Contribution
Large
Childhood
Novel
Made
Obsessional
Wrongs
Upbringing

More quotes by V. S. Pritchett

Image
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
Image
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.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
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
Image
There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
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
Image
Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
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
Image
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
Image
It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.
V. S. Pritchett