Wilfrid Sheed Quotes

26 quotes in 474 categories

• The American male doesn't mature until he has exhausted all other possibilities.
• Suicide is about life, being in fact the sincerest form of criticism life gets.
• 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,…
• 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…
• Every writer is a writer of the generation before.
• 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…
• I picked up the writing on the very day he died. It was the only consolation I could find.
• Even the God of Calvin never judged anyone as harshly as married couples judge each other.
• If the French were really intelligent, they'd speak English.
• The spiritual life becomes very simple when you're sick.
• 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…
• 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…
• Unlike most wars, which make rotten fiction in themselves - all plot and no characters, or made-up characters - Vietnam seems to be the perfect…
• 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.
• The worse we treat people in this country, the more delicately we talk about them.
• How does one make a movie about decadence these days? Now that we're allowed to do it, it's too late.
• 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…
• Beware the fictionist writing his own life. Even candor becomes a strategy.
• The 1930s - a Golden Age for American humor, mainly because everything else was going so badly. The wisecrack was the basic American sentence because…
• 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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