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Unnecessary customs live a brutally short life in America.

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
Live
Life
Brutally
Unnecessary
Customs
Short
America

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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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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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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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Every writer is a writer of the generation before.
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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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Mushy reviews are a breach of faith
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Baseball fans are pedants, there is no other kind.
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The worse we treat people in this country, the more delicately we talk about them.
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Suicide is about life, being in fact the sincerest form of criticism life gets.
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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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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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The town is as full as ever of 'characters,' all created by each other.
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The spiritual life becomes very simple when you're sick.
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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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Books about suicide make lousy gifts.
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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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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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I picked up the writing on the very day he died. It was the only consolation I could find.
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Even the God of Calvin never judged anyone as harshly as married couples judge each other.
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