Quote

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.

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)
Whose
Identifying
Passion
Governed
Lives
Alien
Felt
Hopeless
Running
Aliens
Ideas
Mines
Long
Mine
People
Beginning
Nourishing

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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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Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.
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A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.
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The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.
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The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
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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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Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.
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Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.
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I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.
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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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It is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else.
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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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We do not wish to be better than we are, but more fully what we are.
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A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.
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Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.
V. S. Pritchett
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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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Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.
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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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The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.
V. S. Pritchett
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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?
V. S. Pritchett