Wilfrid Sheed Short Quotes

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Baseball fans are pedants, there is no other kind.

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

Wilfrid Sheed
Unnecessary customs live a brutally short life in America.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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