Quote

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

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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
Whole
Miss
Obvious
Case
Missing
Seem
Cases
Point
Artificial
Seems
Symbols

More quotes by 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.
Wilfrid Sheed
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The American male doesn't mature until he has exhausted all other possibilities.
Wilfrid Sheed
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Beware the fictionist writing his own life. Even candor becomes a strategy.
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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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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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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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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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Every writer is a writer of the generation before.
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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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Baseball fans are pedants, there is no other kind.
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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Suicide is about life, being in fact the sincerest form of criticism life gets.
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.
Wilfrid Sheed
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If the French were really intelligent, they'd speak English.
Wilfrid Sheed
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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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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.
Wilfrid Sheed
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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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The worse we treat people in this country, the more delicately we talk about them.
Wilfrid Sheed
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Of course, history is only a muddle of facts and a fuddle of professors, and anyone who thinks it is one clear voice saying Arise, sir Knight deserves a life sentence in Camelot.
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