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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 exciting and emancipating to believe we are one of nature's latest experiments, but what if the experiment is unsuccessful?
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Because of the influence of the cinema, most reports or stories of violence are so pictorial that they lack content or meaning. The camera brings them to our eyes, but does not settle them in our minds, nor in time.
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Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
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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 peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.
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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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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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Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.
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Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.
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A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.
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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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We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.
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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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The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.
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The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.
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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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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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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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