Quote

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

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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)
Difference
Suppose
Louder
Humor
Depth
Vary
Differences
Notes
String
Grows
Spread
Depths
Literature
Indeed
Humour
Deepens
Funny
Keys
Strings
Varies
May
Changes
Note
Farce
Reach
Tragic
Spreads

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We do not wish to be better than we are, but more fully what we are.
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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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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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The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
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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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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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It is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else.
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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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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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A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.
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Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
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The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.
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Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.
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The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.
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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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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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It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.
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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'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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