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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.
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
Rest
Palaces
Peace
Contemplating
Moments
Ecstasy
Soul
Provide
Life
Genuine
Misery
Otherwise
Bears
Saloons
More quotes by Wilfrid Sheed
The American male doesn't mature until he has exhausted all other possibilities.
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Every writer is a writer of the generation before.
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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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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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Unnecessary customs live a brutally short life in America.
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Beware the fictionist writing his own life. Even candor becomes a strategy.
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If the French were really intelligent, they'd speak English.
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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
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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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
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
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.
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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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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.
Wilfrid Sheed
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
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.
Wilfrid Sheed
Mankind has always made too much of its saints and heroes, and how the latter handle the fuss might be called their final test.
Wilfrid Sheed
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.
Wilfrid Sheed
The town is as full as ever of 'characters,' all created by each other.
Wilfrid Sheed
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?
Wilfrid Sheed
