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I picked up the writing on the very day he died. It was the only consolation I could find.

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
Find
Writing
Consolation
Picked
Died

More quotes by 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.
Wilfrid Sheed
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Baseball fans are pedants, there is no other kind.
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If the French were really intelligent, they'd speak English.
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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 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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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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Suicide is about life, being in fact the sincerest form of criticism life gets.
Wilfrid Sheed
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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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Mushy reviews are a breach of faith
Wilfrid Sheed
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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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The worse we treat people in this country, the more delicately we talk about them.
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Unnecessary customs live a brutally short life in America.
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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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.
Wilfrid Sheed
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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).
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.
Wilfrid Sheed
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Every writer is a writer of the generation before.
Wilfrid Sheed
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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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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.
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