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. — V. S. Pritchett Copy Share Image
The businessman who is a novelist is able to drop in on literature and feel no suicidal loss of esteem if the lady is not at home, and he can spend his life preparing without fuss for the awful interview. — V. S. Pritchett Copy Share Image
The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed. — V. S. Pritchett Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive. — V. S. Pritchett Copy Share Image
It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened. — V. S. Pritchett Copy Share Image
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… — V. S. Pritchett Copy Share Image
A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point. — V. S. Pritchett Copy Share Image
The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel. — V. S. Pritchett Copy Share Image
Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed… — V. S. Pritchett Copy Share Image
