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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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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)
Men
Solemn
Like
Popular
Seriously
Took
Art
Best
Enough
Many
Sellers
More quotes by V. S. Pritchett
The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.
V. S. Pritchett
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
Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.
V. S. Pritchett
We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.
V. S. Pritchett
I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.
V. S. Pritchett
It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.
V. S. Pritchett
The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
V. S. Pritchett
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.
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
Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.
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
It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.
V. S. Pritchett
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
Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.
V. S. Pritchett
We do not wish to be better than we are, but more fully what we are.
V. S. Pritchett
There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.
V. S. Pritchett
I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.
V. S. Pritchett
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
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
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
