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Beware the fictionist writing his own life. Even candor becomes a strategy.

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
Candor
Beware
Strategy
Becomes
Writing
Even
Life

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Mushy reviews are a breach of faith
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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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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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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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Baseball fans are pedants, there is no other kind.
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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.
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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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If the French were really intelligent, they'd speak English.
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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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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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The American male doesn't mature until he has exhausted all other possibilities.
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Even the God of Calvin never judged anyone as harshly as married couples judge each other.
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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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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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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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You noodle around with tempo and sound until you get the perfect fit for that particular song, and then, so long as you can sustain it, God is on your side and everything comes easily and even the waiters smile.
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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.
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Suicide is about life, being in fact the sincerest form of criticism life gets.
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