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

More quotes by 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.
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The town is as full as ever of 'characters,' all created by each other.
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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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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.
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Mr Michener, as timeless as a stack of 'National Geographics,' is the ultimate Summer Writer. Just as one goes back to the cottage in Maine, so one goes back to one's Michener.
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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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Unnecessary customs live a brutally short life in America.
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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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Suicide is about life, being in fact the sincerest form of criticism life gets.
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Baseball fans are pedants, there is no other kind.
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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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The American male doesn't mature until he has exhausted all other possibilities.
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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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Mushy reviews are a breach of faith
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If the French were really intelligent, they'd speak English.
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Beware the fictionist writing his own life. Even candor becomes a strategy.
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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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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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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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