5 Wilfrid Sheed Quotes on Truth

Wilfrid Sheed quotes on truth

9. 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.

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

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

29. 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.

46. 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.