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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
America
Live
Life
Brutally
Unnecessary
Customs
Short

More quotes by Wilfrid Sheed

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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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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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The town is as full as ever of 'characters,' all created by each other.
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Mushy reviews are a breach of faith
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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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If the French were really intelligent, they'd speak English.
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The spiritual life becomes very simple when you're sick.
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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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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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Books about suicide make lousy gifts.
Wilfrid Sheed
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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.
Wilfrid Sheed
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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.
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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.
Wilfrid Sheed
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Even the God of Calvin never judged anyone as harshly as married couples judge each other.
Wilfrid Sheed
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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.
Wilfrid Sheed
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Suicide is about life, being in fact the sincerest form of criticism life gets.
Wilfrid Sheed
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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.
Wilfrid Sheed
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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.
Wilfrid Sheed