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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.

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
Thinking
Saying
Knights
Life
Courses
Deserves
Course
Professors
Anyone
Sentence
Clear
Arise
Voice
Sentences
Camelot
History
Thinks
Muddle
Facts
Deserve
Knight

More quotes by Wilfrid Sheed

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The town is as full as ever of 'characters,' all created by each other.
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Suicide is about life, being in fact the sincerest form of criticism life gets.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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 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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Whether or not Big Brother is watching us, we certainly have to watch him, which may be even worse.
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Mushy reviews are a breach of faith
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?
Wilfrid Sheed
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Books about suicide make lousy gifts.
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The worse we treat people in this country, the more delicately we talk about them.
Wilfrid Sheed
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The American male doesn't mature until he has exhausted all other possibilities.
Wilfrid Sheed
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Unnecessary customs live a brutally short life in America.
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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.
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Even the God of Calvin never judged anyone as harshly as married couples judge each other.
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