Wilfrid Sheed Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

Baseball fans are pedants, there is no other kind.

Wilfrid Sheed
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
His interviewing self is, or was, an extra person, like the Holy Ghost, generated by self-contemplation.

Wilfrid Sheed
It had always been a notion of mine that sanity is like a clearing in the jungle where the humans agree to meet from time to time and behave in certain fixed ways that even a baboon could master, like Englishmen dressing for dinner in the tropics.

Wilfrid Sheed
I myself have not met a self-confessed liberal since the late fifties (and even then it was a tacky thing to admit, like coming from the middle class or the Middle West, those two gloomy seedbeds of talent), yet hardly a day passes that I don't read another attack on the "typical liberal" — as it might be announcing a pest of dinosaurs or a plague of unicorns.

Wilfrid Sheed
What he feared most was the blind spot between us and the future, the space between identities where we could get lost forever.

Wilfrid Sheed
The one kind of society that the Church cannot adjust to is no society at all, i. e., a setup where community has become so fragmented that a communal religion is a fiction, sustained only by talk and make-news items in the press and television.

Wilfrid Sheed
Through the burgeoning university network, it was suddenly possible to think of oneself as a national poet, even if the nation turned out to consist entirely of English departments.

Wilfrid Sheed
That is the best story he could find in his life, never mind if it's the truest: an artist's duty is always to tell the best story.

Wilfrid Sheed
Not that there weren't real communists in the labor unions, and real spies in Washington, but these had nothing to do with the show that was being put on for us, which seemed entirely designed to Make Us Take This Thing Seriously. From abroad, where I was for much of the time, it looked as if the United States were trying to act like a superpower by holding its very own show trials.

Wilfrid Sheed
Professor Bell, in his tortured efforts to sound fair and impersonal, arrives at an aesthetic principle too edifying for Art to bear. He says in effect that you can explore evil, drawing "on the tap roots of the demonic," but you may not approve it. But when you draw on those tap roots, who knows what you will find? Writers just back from their season in hell are likely to be covered in goat blood and tend to rave. The moralists can sort out the evidence later. But the writer with the correct attitude could not have entered hell in the first place.

Wilfrid Sheed
Childhood lays itself out, like a novel, he suggests, complete with central observer, fixed characters, and linear plot. Later, life disperses itself into anecdotes. At twenty-one, it no longer strictly matters whether the author went first to Ireland and then to Spain, or Spain first. And after thirty, he could stitch the pages in backward for all we care.

Wilfrid Sheed
The desire not to destroy the palace but to move into it oneself has always been the occupational curse of revolutionaries.

Wilfrid Sheed
In modern American style, his job, not his past, defined him.

Wilfrid Sheed
When a reviewer says that Malamud is second only to Bellow, it means he really isn't thinking about either of them. When he's reading Malamud he's thinking about Bellow, and when he's reading Bellow he's thinking about Roth. This is the essence of the ratings game: distraction. Children play it all the time. "Is this the biggest bridge in the world?" "No, it's the third biggest." "Oh." They lose all interest in the bridge.

Wilfrid Sheed
As enviable and unreachable as a face in a train window.

Wilfrid Sheed
It is a fallacy to think that carping is the strongest form of criticism: the important work begins after the artist's mistakes have been pointed out, and the reviewer can't put it off indefinitely with sneers, although some neophytes might be tempted to try: "When in doubt, stick out your tongue" is a safe rule that never cost one any readers. But there's nothing strong about it, and it has nothing to do with the real business of criticism, which is to do justice to the best work of one's time, so that nothing gets lost.

Wilfrid Sheed
If God had died in the blare of the twentieth century and in houses too new and cheap to be haunted, one must seek him in the old quiet places, where he might still live on in retirement.

Wilfrid Sheed
Chicago 1968 taught one how close any civilized country is to berserkness at all times; also how terrorism, even silly terrorism, strengthens the cops more than anyone. Yet already this European-style history lesson has been watered down by consensus into something crazy we did in the sixties, just as we "did" McCarthyism in the fifties. As if a nation changes its nature completely every ten years; as if social forces were as evanescent as hula hoops or skateboards, instead of as remorseless as glaciers.

Wilfrid Sheed
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.

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
Whether or not Big Brother is watching us, we certainly have to watch him, which may be even worse.

Wilfrid Sheed
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
The bad debater never knows that one explanation is better than five.

Wilfrid Sheed
How does one make a movie about decadence these days? Now that we're allowed to do it, it's too late.

Wilfrid Sheed
The town is as full as ever of 'characters,' all created by each other.

Wilfrid Sheed
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
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
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
Suicide itself is about life, being in fact the sincerest form of criticism life gets.

Wilfrid Sheed