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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.

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
Always
Tests
Fuss
Handle
Saints
Hero
Heroes
Mankind
Latter
Called
Final
Might
Finals
Much
Test
Made
Saint

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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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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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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.
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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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Beware the fictionist writing his own life. Even candor becomes a strategy.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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The town is as full as ever of 'characters,' all created by each other.
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Every writer is a writer of the generation before.
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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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I picked up the writing on the very day he died. It was the only consolation I could find.
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The American male doesn't mature until he has exhausted all other possibilities.
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The spiritual life becomes very simple when you're sick.
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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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