Wilfrid Sheed Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

Unnecessary customs live a brutally short life in America.

Wilfrid Sheed
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.

Wilfrid Sheed
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
Sad things can happen when an author chooses the wrong subject: first the author suffers, then the reader, and finally the publisher, all together in a tiny whirlpool of pain.

Wilfrid Sheed
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.

Wilfrid Sheed
A Broadway play is so much an event, designed down to the bit parts to explode in your face on one particular night, that it is hard to judge any one of them fairly from the scrawny instructions known as a script.

Wilfrid Sheed
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
Off she'd go to the hospital, a place I believe she secretly liked because they treat you like a child there.

Wilfrid Sheed
The worse we treat people in this country, the more delicately we talk about them.

Wilfrid Sheed
Beware the fictionist writing his own life. Even candor becomes a strategy.

Wilfrid Sheed
Happy the man with a book-length grievance — and rare. Each of these books contains one possible magazine article surrounded by more padding than an offensive lineman: every little indignity that ever happened to them, and every two-bit feud, magnified to a Horrible Example to justify a larger printing.

Wilfrid Sheed
The best comedy is always heartless, an alternative to rational emotion.

Wilfrid Sheed
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
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.

Wilfrid Sheed
He was truly after an art in which the creator could be as intelligent as he liked, but in which intelligence must be transmuted entirely into form, so that no lumps of thinking are left showing.

Wilfrid Sheed
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
Today's novelist is not only limited by the thin subject matter of personal experience, but by the pinched clinical conventions of the Health generation. Faced with Othello, say, he would have to divide the man into departments, like a liberal arts course. Race relations — that's still a subject, although of course whites can't write about blacks and vice versa; sexual politics (somehow); Othello's ultimate therapy and decision to endure. Since jealousy is now curable, like TB, we can't have people dying of it anymore. A few rap sessions, some fearless touching, and a new sense of self-worth would have Othello and Iago and Hamlet and Juliet back on their feet in no time; and Fiction struggling.

Wilfrid Sheed
As you approach the presidency, no one seems worthy of it, since it wasn't designed for a human in the first place.

Wilfrid Sheed
Both of them were artists with highly developed personas, and hence unreliable witnesses to their own pasts.

Wilfrid Sheed
This country is merciless to good small talents. A writer who doesn't take chances and swing for the fences (whether or not he has a prayer of reaching them) is less than a man.

Wilfrid Sheed
Carmichael was, like many Americans, a divided soul, part nomad and part homebody, who seemed a little bit at home everywhere, but was probably more so someplace else, if he could just find it.

Wilfrid Sheed
The rational man may talk a good game about suicide, but reason must give way to obsession and finally squalor before he can actually do it.

Wilfrid Sheed
The odds on any intelligent person having an unhappy childhood are better than fair, and the odds on a sad ending are practically off the board.

Wilfrid Sheed
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
A deadly streak of passivity of a kind that sometimes goes with perfectionism.

Wilfrid Sheed