Wilfrid Sheed quotes

The American male doesn't mature until he has exhausted all other possibilities. (Wilfrid Sheed)
I picked up the writing on the very day he died. It was the only consolation I could find.
Wilfrid Sheed
Every writer is a writer of the generation before.
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
Baseball fans are pedants, there is no other kind.
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
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
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
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
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
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)
The worse we treat people in this country, the more delicately we talk about them.
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
Whether or not Big Brother is watching us, we certainly have to watch him, which may be even worse.
Wilfrid Sheed
One reason the human race has such a low opinion of itself is that it gets so much of its wisdom from writers. (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
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 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
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