Wilfrid Sheed: Trending quotes

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“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)

Life , Childhood

“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

“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)

God , Fate , War , Thinking

“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)

“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)

“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)

Thinking , Universe

“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)

People , Health , Jealousy , Art

“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