Literary Birthday – 16 December – V. S. Pritchett

V. S. Pritchett was born 16 December 1900 and died 20 March 1997.

V. S. Pritchett Quotes

1. Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.
2. I have always thought that life and literature are intermingled and that this intermingling has been my quest.
3. The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.
4. It’s all in the art. You get no credit for living.
5. I had no other way of starting. I think the experience is indispensable. I know writers who have never touched journalism, but they have private means. A creative writer is better formed by himself than by institutions. But it is a risk; one has to be certain and prove oneself. So, I don’t regret having been a journalist. I think it was a good apprenticeship.
6. The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.
7. The short story appealed to me straight away because of its shortness, and I preferred it to the novel. It represents a certain vision of reality that consists of isolating the incident. The great thing about the short story is the detail, not the plot.
8. Dialogue is my form of poetry. I can’t write poetry to save my life. Dialogue is the nearest I can come to the poetic.
9. On short stories: something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.

V. S. Pritchett was a British writer and literary critic. He is known for his short stories, and his non-fiction works, the memoirs A Cab at the Door and Midnight Oil, and his many collections of essays on literary biography and criticism.

Source for image: Тимур Усман, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pritchett.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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