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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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A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.
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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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It is often said that in Ireland there is an excess of genius unsustained by talent but there is talent in the tongues.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.
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Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.
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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.
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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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The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.
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Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
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