V. S. Pritchett
V. S. Pritchett
Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett CH CBE, was a British writer and literary critic...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth16 December 1900
writing stories novelists
The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
humorous hopeless uncouth
The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.
personality youth periods
Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.
wish
We do not wish to be better than we are, but more fully what we are.
like-love superstitions peculiar
The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.
art yawning sake
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.
running passion ideas
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.
funny humor differences
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.
talking two well-known
It is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else.
important england born
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.
people academic used
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.
school eye museums
Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious piety and parlour game.
magic sin committed
There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.
past remember edges
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.