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There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.

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)
Committed
Sin
Magic

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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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A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.
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Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.
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Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.
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I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.
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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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Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.
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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.
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The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.
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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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A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.
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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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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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It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.
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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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Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.
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A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.
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It is exciting and emancipating to believe we are one of nature's latest experiments, but what if the experiment is unsuccessful?
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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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I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.
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