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The only reason I didn't kill myself after I read the reviews of my first book was because we have two rivers in New York and I couldn't decide which one to jumo into.

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
Writing
Couldn
Read
Didn
Two
Reviews
Reason
Decide
Firsts
Rivers
Book
York
First
Kill

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The town is as full as ever of 'characters,' all created by each other.
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If the French were really intelligent, they'd speak English.
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Whether or not Big Brother is watching us, we certainly have to watch him, which may be even worse.
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How does one make a movie about decadence these days? Now that we're allowed to do it, it's too late.
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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.
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Censors will try to censor a little bit more each year (because, like editors and other officious people, censors don't feel they are getting anywhere unless they are up and doing).
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Every writer is a writer of the generation before.
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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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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.
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Mankind has always made too much of its saints and heroes, and how the latter handle the fuss might be called their final test.
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Books about suicide make lousy gifts.
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Suicide is about life, being in fact the sincerest form of criticism life gets.
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I picked up the writing on the very day he died. It was the only consolation I could find.
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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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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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Mushy reviews are a breach of faith
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The worse we treat people in this country, the more delicately we talk about them.
Wilfrid Sheed
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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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The spiritual life becomes very simple when you're sick.
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Unnecessary customs live a brutally short life in America.
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