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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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Wilfrid Sheed
Age: 80 †
Born: 1930
Born: December 27
Died: 2011
Died: January 19
Novelist
London
England
Wilfrid John Joseph Sheed
Treat
Treats
Worse
Talk
Country
People
Delicately

More quotes by 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.
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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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Whether or not Big Brother is watching us, we certainly have to watch him, which may be even worse.
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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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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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I picked up the writing on the very day he died. It was the only consolation I could find.
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The spiritual life becomes very simple when you're sick.
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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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Beware the fictionist writing his own life. Even candor becomes a strategy.
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The town is as full as ever of 'characters,' all created by each other.
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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.
Wilfrid Sheed
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Mushy reviews are a breach of faith
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.
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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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Even the God of Calvin never judged anyone as harshly as married couples judge each other.
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If the French were really intelligent, they'd speak English.
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Every writer is a writer of the generation before.
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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