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
men armchairs mausoleum
Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.
natural tense native
A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.
dirty glasses sight
[London is] like the sight of a heavy sea from a rowing boat in the middle of the Atlantic.... One lives in it, afloat but half submerged in a heavy flood of brick, stone, asphalt, slate, steel, glass, concrete, and tarmac, seeing nothing fixable beyond a few score white spires that splash up like spits of foam above the next glum wave of dirty buildings.
art yawning stories
Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.
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.
art max comedy
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.
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.
character stories celebration
A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.
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.