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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.

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
Else
Badly
Everything
Sentence
Many
Sentences
Going
Golden
Way
Basic
Things
Humor
Age
American
Mainly

More quotes by 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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Even the God of Calvin never judged anyone as harshly as married couples judge each other.
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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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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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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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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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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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Beware the fictionist writing his own life. Even candor becomes a strategy.
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Books about suicide make lousy gifts.
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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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I picked up the writing on the very day he died. It was the only consolation I could find.
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Baseball fans are pedants, there is no other kind.
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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
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Every writer is a writer of the generation before.
Wilfrid Sheed
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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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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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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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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).
Wilfrid Sheed
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Whether or not Big Brother is watching us, we certainly have to watch him, which may be even worse.
Wilfrid Sheed