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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
People
Delicately
Treat
Treats
Worse
Talk
Country

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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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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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The American male doesn't mature until he has exhausted all other possibilities.
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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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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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I picked up the writing on the very day he died. It was the only consolation I could find.
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The town is as full as ever of 'characters,' all created by each other.
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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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Baseball fans are pedants, there is no other kind.
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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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Books about suicide make lousy gifts.
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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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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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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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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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Beware the fictionist writing his own life. Even candor becomes a strategy.
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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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Suicide is about life, being in fact the sincerest form of criticism life gets.
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