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. V. S. Pritchett More Quotes by V. S. Pritchett More Quotes From V. S. Pritchett 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. V. S. Pritchett roles looks world 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 yawning example art One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic potential. V. S. Pritchett emotion creative self Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough. V. S. Pritchett enough men art 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. V. S. Pritchett violence eye mind Absolute Evil is not the kingdom of hell. The inhabitants of hell are ourselves, i.e., those who pay our painful, embarrassing, humanistic duties to society and who are compromised by our intellectually dubious commitment to virtue, which can be defined by the perpetual smear-word of French polemic: the bourgeois. (Bourgeois equals humanist.) This word has long been anathema in France where categories are part of the ruling notion of logique. The word cannot be readily matched in England or America. V. S. Pritchett long america commitment 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. V. S. Pritchett use giving order Some writers thrive on the contact with the commerce of success; others are corrupted by it. Perhaps, like losing one's virginity,it is not as bad (or as good) as one feared it was going to be. V. S. Pritchett contact thrive losing There is more magic in sin if it is not committed. V. S. Pritchett magic committed sin A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point. V. S. Pritchett celebration stories character 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. V. S. Pritchett born england important It is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else. V. S. Pritchett well-known talking two 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. V. S. Pritchett eye games school The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it. V. S. Pritchett like-love superstitions peculiar 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. V. S. Pritchett memories lying people The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive. V. S. Pritchett assertive cautious spirit Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere. V. S. Pritchett habit life thinking [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. V. S. Pritchett sight sea dirty A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense. V. S. Pritchett tense new-yorkers natural Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women. V. S. Pritchett mausoleum armchairs men
