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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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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)
Foreign
English
Evidence
Talk
Love
Like
Superstition
Superstitions
Peculiar

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The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.
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Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
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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.
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I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.
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We do not wish to be better than we are, but more fully what we are.
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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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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.
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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.
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The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.
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It is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else.
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Now, practically all reviewers have academic aspirations. The people from the universities are used to a captive audience, but the literary journalist has to please his audience.
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How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.
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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.
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The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.
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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.
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