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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.

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)
Form
Removed
Life
Classic
Contact
Philistinism
Sake
Yawning
Build
Pretends
Novel
Specialized
Example
Detective
Art
Detectives

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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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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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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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The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.
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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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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 peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.
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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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A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.
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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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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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Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
V. S. Pritchett
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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.
V. S. Pritchett
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A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.
V. S. Pritchett
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I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.
V. S. Pritchett
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It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.
V. S. Pritchett
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Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.
V. S. Pritchett
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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.
V. S. Pritchett