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

More quotes by Wilfrid Sheed

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As you approach the presidency, no one seems worthy of it, since it wasn't designed for a human in the first place.
Wilfrid Sheed
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As things now stand, the office is a slightly meaner battleground than the home. Male bosses seem to dominate their women underlings as they would never dominate their wives.
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Suicide is about life, being in fact the sincerest form of criticism life gets.
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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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Every writer is a writer of the generation before.
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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.
Wilfrid Sheed
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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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I rail against writers who talk about the loneliness of it all — what do they want, a crowd looking over their typewriters? Or those who talk about having to stare at a blank page — do they want someone to write on it?
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The American male doesn't mature until he has exhausted all other possibilities.
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The town is as full as ever of 'characters,' all created by each other.
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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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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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Even the God of Calvin never judged anyone as harshly as married couples judge each other.
Wilfrid Sheed
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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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The worse we treat people in this country, the more delicately we talk about them.
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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Mushy reviews are a breach of faith
Wilfrid Sheed
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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.
Wilfrid Sheed
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Books about suicide make lousy gifts.
Wilfrid Sheed
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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.
Wilfrid Sheed