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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
Delicately
Treat
Treats
Worse
Talk
Country
People

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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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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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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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If the French were really intelligent, they'd speak English.
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The American male doesn't mature until he has exhausted all other possibilities.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Mushy reviews are a breach of faith
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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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Books about suicide make lousy gifts.
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Beware the fictionist writing his own life. Even candor becomes a strategy.
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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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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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