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Mushy reviews are a breach of faith

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
Reviews
Faith
Mushy
Breach

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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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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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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The worse we treat people in this country, the more delicately we talk about them.
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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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If the French were really intelligent, they'd speak English.
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
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Whether or not Big Brother is watching us, we certainly have to watch him, which may be even worse.
Wilfrid Sheed
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Every writer is a writer of the generation before.
Wilfrid Sheed
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The spiritual life becomes very simple when you're sick.
Wilfrid Sheed
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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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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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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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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
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The American male doesn't mature until he has exhausted all other possibilities.
Wilfrid Sheed
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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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Unnecessary customs live a brutally short life in America.
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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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.
Wilfrid Sheed
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Books about suicide make lousy gifts.
Wilfrid Sheed