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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.

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
Subjects
Writer
Talent
Neutral
Talk
Functions
Though
Applied
Anything
Narrow
Find
Substance
People
Function

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Unnecessary customs live a brutally short life in America.
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Books about suicide make lousy gifts.
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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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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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Mushy reviews are a breach of faith
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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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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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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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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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Suicide is about life, being in fact the sincerest form of criticism life gets.
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If the French were really intelligent, they'd speak English.
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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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The worse we treat people in this country, the more delicately we talk about them.
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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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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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Mr Michener, as timeless as a stack of 'National Geographics,' is the ultimate Summer Writer. Just as one goes back to the cottage in Maine, so one goes back to one's Michener.
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Every writer is a writer of the generation before.
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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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