1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Wilfrid Sheed

Wilfrid Sheed Quotes

Wilfrid John Joseph Sheed was an English-born American novelist and essayist.

Sheed was born in London, to Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward, prominent Roman Catholic publishers in the United Kingdom and the United States during the mid-20th century. Wilfrid Sheed spent his childhood in both England and the United States before attending Downside School and Lincoln College, Oxford where he earned BA and MA degrees.

Sheed's first novel, A Middle Class Education , was based on his experiences at Oxford. His biography Frank and Maisie was about his parents' literary establishment and intellectual world. He wrote satirical novels about journalism and memoirs in his later years. His book on American popular music, entitled The House that George Built with a little help from Irving, Cole and a Crew of about Fifty was published in 2008.

Garrison Keillor commented in a review of the book:



"Golden Age of American Song has been saluted and high-faluted in books and wept over repeatedly, but “The House That George Built” is a big rich stew of an homage that makes you want to listen to Gershwin and Berlin and Porter and Arlen all over again ... Sheed's jazzy prose is a joy to read. It goes catapulting along, digressing like mad, never pedantic, a little frantic, which is just right: the jazz song, like all true art, is a flight from depression, indifference, the cold blank stare, the earnest clammy touch.

✵ 27. December 1930 – 19. January 2011
Wilfrid Sheed: 50   quotes 0   likes

Famous Wilfrid Sheed Quotes

“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

"V. S. Pritchett: Midnight Oil," p. 224
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“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

"Honoring Ezra Pound" (1972), p. 59
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“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

"Program Notes," p. xiv
Essays in Disguise (1990)

“Unnecessary customs live a brutally short life in America.”

Wilfrid Sheed

"Now That Men Can Cry..." (1977), p. 290
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“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

"A Moral Problem" (1974), p. 88
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“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

"Miami 1972" (1972), p. 283
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Wilfrid Sheed Quotes about life

“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

"V. S. Pritchett: Midnight Oil," p. 227
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“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

"Now That Men Can Cry...," p. 299
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“Beware the fictionist writing his own life. Even candor becomes a strategy.”

Wilfrid Sheed

"V. S. Pritchett: Midnight Oil" (1972), p. 223
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“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

"The Aesthetics of Politics," p. 156
Essays in Disguise (1990)

Wilfrid Sheed Quotes about thinking

“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

"A Fun-House Mirror" (1972), pp. 107-108
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“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

"Hard Times for Poets," p. 85
Essays in Disguise (1990)

“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

"Ernest Hemingway" (1977), p. 240
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“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."”

Wilfrid Sheed

They lose all interest in the bridge.
"The Art of Reviewing" (1973), p. 10
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“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

"Program Notes," pp. xvi-xvii
Essays in Disguise (1990)

Wilfrid Sheed: Trending quotes

“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

"Now That Men Can Cry...," p. 296
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Women , Home

“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

"Unnecessary Roughness" (1971), p. 150
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Books , Happiness

“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

Walker Percy Redivivus" (1971), p. 130
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Wilfrid Sheed Quotes

“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

"Spock Mugged" (1973), p. 91
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Reading

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

Wilfrid Sheed

"The Wit of George S. Kaufman and Dorothy Parker," p. 160
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Past

“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

"Howe's Complaint" (1973), p. 15
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

People

“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 Wit of George S. Kaufman and Dorothy Parker" (1973) p. 159
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Sadness , Intelligence , Childhood , Personality

“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

"Chicago on My Mind" (1973), p. 266
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

History , Nature , Water , Change

“The bad debater never knows that one explanation is better than five.”

Wilfrid Sheed

"The Aesthetics of Politics," p. 155
Essays in Disguise (1990)

“Baseball fans are pedants, there is no other kind.”

Wilfrid Sheed

"Why Can't the Movies Play Ball?," The New York Times (1989-05-14)

“In modern American style, his job, not his past, defined him.”

Wilfrid Sheed

"The Wit of George S. Kaufman and Dorothy Parker," p. 162
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Past

“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

"Come on, Big Boy — Let Me See Your Manuscript," review and interview by Herbert Gold, The New York Times (1987-08-02)

Loneliness

“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

"A. Alvarez: The Savage God" (1972), p. 69
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Way , Game , Suicide

“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

Clare Boothe Luce http://books.google.com/books?id=mVYfAQAAMAAJ&q=%22A+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%22&pg=PA69#v=onepage (1982)

Parting , Night

“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

"James Thurber: Men, Women, and Dogs" (1975), p. 228
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Age , Way

“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

"The Interview as Art," p. 209
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Faith , Literature , Passion , Reading

“As enviable and unreachable as a face in a train window.”

Wilfrid Sheed

"James Thurber: Men, Women, and Dogs," p. 228
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Training

“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

"On Keeping Closets Closed" (1973), p. 76
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

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

Wilfrid Sheed

"I Am a Cabaret" (1972), p. 203
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

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

Wilfrid Sheed

"The Interview as Art" (1976), p. 208
Referring to W. H. Auden
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Personality

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

Wilfrid Sheed

"The Aesthetics of Politics," p. 156
Essays in Disguise (1990)

“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

"George Orwell, Artist" (1972), p. 46
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Fear , Future

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

Wilfrid Sheed

"Men's Women, Women's Men" (1971), p. 137
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

People , Country

“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 House That George Built (2007)

Home , Soul , Parting

“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

"Baseball Was Very, Very Good to Him," The New York Times (2000-10-29)

“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

"Church," p. 120
Essays in Disguise (1990)

Religion , Communication

“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

In Love with Daylight (1995)

Way , Time

“The best comedy is always heartless, an alternative to rational emotion.”

Wilfrid Sheed

"The Wit of George S. Kaufman and Dorothy Parker," p. 162
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

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

Wilfrid Sheed

"Writers' Politics" (1971), p. 66
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“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

"Letters of E. B. White" (1976), p. 251
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Chance , Country

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

Wilfrid Sheed

"Miss Jean Stafford," p. 71
Essays in Disguise (1990)

“Standing still as a statue in the October shadows, he looked, grotesquely, more like a patriot than anything usually seen on a baseball field. A trick of light perhaps. Yet what famous athlete last died for a cause bigger than himself? Clemente could sometimes seem like a pest, a nagging narcissist, with only his burningly serious play to deny it. Yet when that plane crashed carrying relief supplies to Nicaragua we saw what he had meant all along. It was like the old Clemente crashing into the right field wall in a losing game: the act of a totally serious man.
By chance I met Clemente once, in the humble role of autograph-seeker. He was doing wind sprints down at the Pirate training camp in Bradenton, Florida. And although I claimed I was getting an autograph for my son (true, for a change), he looked at me with a hidalgo’s contempt – at a grown man simpering over a blunt pencil; he turned his back abruptly and did another wind sprint, then slashed his name onto my scorecard and sauntered away. To hell with you, Clemente, I thought. But on the way out, I saw him funning with three old ladies from Allentown, Pennsylvania, and I have never seen sweeter courtesy.”

Wilfrid Sheed

From the foreword to Clemente! (1973) by Kal Wagenheim

Way , Game , Hell , Light

“A deadly streak of passivity of a kind that sometimes goes with perfectionism.”

Wilfrid Sheed

"Miss Jean Stafford," p. 71
Essays in Disguise (1990)

“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

"Dirty Business" (1973), p. 83
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

People , Feeling

“Censors will try to censor a little bit more each year”

Wilfrid Sheed

because, like editors and other officious people, censors don't feel they are getting anywhere unless they are up and doing
"Dirty Business" (1973), p. 83
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Similar authors

Christopher Morley photo
Christopher Morley 30
American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet
Marcel Proust photo
Marcel Proust 41
French novelist, critic, and essayist
John Galsworthy photo
John Galsworthy 48
English novelist and playwright
Herta Müller photo
Herta Müller 28
German-Romanian novelist, poet and essayist
Edward Abbey photo
Edward Abbey 146
American author and essayist
George Santayana photo
George Santayana 109
20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with P…
Vladimir Nabokov photo
Vladimir Nabokov 193
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor
Julio Cortázar photo
Julio Cortázar 29
Argentinian writer
Jorge Luis Borges photo
Jorge Luis Borges 213
Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator…
Paul Valéry photo
Paul Valéry 89
French poet, essayist, and philosopher