“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)

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Wilfrid Sheed 50
English-American novelist and essayist 1930–2011

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