Wilfrid Sheed Quotes
Wilfrid Sheed writes plain-spoken, slightly sardonic commentary on art, writing and the politics of talent.
-
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?
-
Baseball fans are pedants, there is no other kind.
-
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.
-
Mankind has always made too much of its saints and heroes, and how the latter handle the fuss might be called their final test.
-
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.
-
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.' They lose all interest in the bridge.
-
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.
-
What he feared most was the blind spot between us and the future, the space between identities where we could get lost forever.
-
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.
-
The desire not to destroy the palace but to move into it oneself has always been the occupational curse of revolutionaries.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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).
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Both of them were artists with highly developed personas, and hence unreliable witnesses to their own pasts.
-
In modern American style, his job, not his past, defined him.
-
The best comedy is always heartless, an alternative to rational emotion.
-
How does one make a movie about decadence these days? Now that we're allowed to do it, it's too late.
-
His interviewing self is, or was, an extra person, like the Holy Ghost, generated by self-contemplation.
-
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.
-
Beware the fictionist writing his own life. Even candor becomes a strategy.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
As enviable and unreachable as a face in a train window.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
As you approach the presidency, no one seems worthy of it, since it wasn't designed for a human in the first place.
-
Unnecessary customs live a brutally short life in America.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Off she'd go to the hospital, a place I believe she secretly liked because they treat you like a child there.
-
A deadly streak of passivity of a kind that sometimes goes with perfectionism.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The bad debater never knows that one explanation is better than five.
-
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.
-
Whether or not Big Brother is watching us, we certainly have to watch him, which may be even worse.
-
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 the land of Father Says.
-
I picked up the writing on the very day he died. It was the only consolation I could find.
-
The actual Irish weather report is really a recording made in 1922, which no one has had occasion to change. "Scattered showers, periods of sunshine."
-
The town is as full as ever of 'characters,' all created by each other.
-
You noodle around with tempo and sound until you get the perfect fit for that particular song, and then, so long as you can sustain it, God is on your side and everything comes easily and even the waiters smile.
-
Every writer is a writer of the generation before.
-
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, so one goes back to one's Michener.
-
Scott Fitzgerald is a sound you like to hear at certain times of the day, say at four in the afternoon and again late at night, and at other times it makes you slightly sick.
-
The American male doesn't mature until he has exhausted all other possibilities.
-
The spiritual life becomes very simple when you're sick.
-
If the French were really intelligent, they'd speak English.
-
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 and I couldn't decide which one to jumo into.
-
Books about suicide make lousy gifts.
-
Even the God of Calvin never judged anyone as harshly as married couples judge each other.
-
Suicide is about life, being in fact the sincerest form of criticism life gets.
-
Mushy reviews are a breach of faith