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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

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

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Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.
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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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Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
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Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.
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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.
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It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.
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Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
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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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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.
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We do not wish to be better than we are, but more fully what we are.
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A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.
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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.
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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.
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I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.
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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