Quote

One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic potential.

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)
Creative
Sellers
Upon
Recalls
Best
Dramatic
Self
Impulse
Great
Pity
Much
Potential
Depends
Emotion

More quotes by V. S. Pritchett

Image
How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
[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
Image
There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
We do not wish to be better than we are, but more fully what we are.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.
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
The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
It is exciting and emancipating to believe we are one of nature's latest experiments, but what if the experiment is unsuccessful?
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
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
It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.
V. S. Pritchett
Image
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
Image
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
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