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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.
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)
Give
Lower
Giving
Popular
Great
Writers
Good
Meet
Always
Taste
Helplessly
Use
Declining
Away
Plane
Order
Planes
More quotes by V. S. Pritchett
The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.
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
The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.
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
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
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
Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.
V. S. Pritchett
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
Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
V. S. Pritchett
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
Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.
V. S. Pritchett
How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.
V. S. Pritchett
Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.
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
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
We do not wish to be better than we are, but more fully what we are.
V. S. Pritchett
We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.
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
I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.
V. S. Pritchett
The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.
V. S. Pritchett