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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

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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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The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
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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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Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.
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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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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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There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.
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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 less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.
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It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.
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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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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 State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.
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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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[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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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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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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It is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else.
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