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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?

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
Looking
Blank
Talk
Crowd
Write
Staring
Someone
Crowds
Writing
Page
Loneliness
Typewriters
Pages
Rail
Writers
Stare

More quotes by Wilfrid Sheed

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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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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.
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Even the God of Calvin never judged anyone as harshly as married couples judge each other.
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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.
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The American male doesn't mature until he has exhausted all other possibilities.
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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.
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Books about suicide make lousy gifts.
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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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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 worse we treat people in this country, the more delicately we talk about them.
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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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Baseball fans are pedants, there is no other kind.
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The spiritual life becomes very simple when you're sick.
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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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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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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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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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Mushy reviews are a breach of faith
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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Every writer is a writer of the generation before.
Wilfrid Sheed