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Suicide is about life, being in fact the sincerest form of criticism life gets.

Wilfrid Sheed

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Wilfrid Sheed
Age: 80 †
Born: 1930
Born: December 27
Died: 2011
Died: January 19
Novelist
London
England
Wilfrid John Joseph Sheed
Facts
Form
Sincerest
Life
Suicide
Criticism
Dying
Gets
Fact
Death

More quotes by Wilfrid Sheed

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Saloons provide moments of genuine ecstasy - but only if your soul is at peace and the rest of your life bears contemplating. Otherwise, they are palaces of misery.
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The actual Irish weather report is really a recording made in 1922, which no one has had occasion to change. Scattered showers, periods of sunshine.
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Beware the fictionist writing his own life. Even candor becomes a strategy.
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It's the old case against symbols: if you get them, they seem obvious and artificial, and if you don't, you miss the whole point.
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The town is as full as ever of 'characters,' all created by each other.
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For now, I'm supposing that all movements are equal, which they're not, except in this respect: that none of them gives a damn about artists beyond their immediate utility. Good movements will use a writer just as ruthlessly as bad ones since they all fancy they have better things to do than worry about one man's artistic survival.
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Books about suicide make lousy gifts.
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Every writer is a writer of the generation before.
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For Catholics before Vatican II, the land of the free was pre-eminently the land of Sister Says-except, of course, for Sister, for whom it was the land of Father Says.
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Of course, history is only a muddle of facts and a fuddle of professors, and anyone who thinks it is one clear voice saying Arise, sir Knight deserves a life sentence in Camelot.
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It is possible that the malice of writers has been overrated (by myself among others). Reading their ruminations on their craft, one sees why this writer could not possibly like that one, would indeed consider him a menace. Literature is a battleground of conflicting faiths, and nobler passions than envy are involved.
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Unlike most wars, which make rotten fiction in themselves - all plot and no characters, or made-up characters - Vietnam seems to be the perfect mix: the characters make the war, and the war unmakes the characters. The gods, fates, furies had a relatively small hand in it. The mess was man-made, a synthetic, by think tank out of briefing session.
Wilfrid Sheed
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Whether or not Big Brother is watching us, we certainly have to watch him, which may be even worse.
Wilfrid Sheed
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You noodle around with tempo and sound until you get the perfect fit for that particular song, and then, so long as you can sustain it, God is on your side and everything comes easily and even the waiters smile.
Wilfrid Sheed
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Mushy reviews are a breach of faith
Wilfrid Sheed
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Unnecessary customs live a brutally short life in America.
Wilfrid Sheed
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Scott Fitzgerald is a sound you like to hear at certain times of the day, say at four in the afternoon and again late at night, and at other times it makes you slightly sick.
Wilfrid Sheed
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Even the God of Calvin never judged anyone as harshly as married couples judge each other.
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People talk about talent as though it were some neutral substance that can be applied to anything. But talent is narrow and only functions with a very few subjects, which it is up to the writer to find.
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The 1930s - a Golden Age for American humor, mainly because everything else was going so badly. The wisecrack was the basic American sentence because there were so many things that could not be said any other way.
Wilfrid Sheed