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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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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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Unnecessary customs live a brutally short life in America.
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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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Beware the fictionist writing his own life. Even candor becomes a strategy.
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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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Books about suicide make lousy gifts.
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Even the God of Calvin never judged anyone as harshly as married couples judge each other.
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Every writer is a writer of the generation before.
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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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Mushy reviews are a breach of faith
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The worse we treat people in this country, the more delicately we talk about them.
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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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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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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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The town is as full as ever of 'characters,' all created by each other.
Wilfrid Sheed
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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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Whether or not Big Brother is watching us, we certainly have to watch him, which may be even worse.
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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.
Wilfrid Sheed