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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.

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)
University
Captives
Please
Universities
Audience
Aspirations
Used
Practically
People
Aspiration
Literary
Academic
Captive
Journalist
Reviewers

More quotes by V. S. Pritchett

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There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.
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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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It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.
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Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
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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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One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic potential.
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A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.
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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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Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.
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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 makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
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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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[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.
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It is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else.
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Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.
V. S. Pritchett
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Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.
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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.
V. S. Pritchett
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The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.
V. S. Pritchett
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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 mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.
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