Wilfrid Sheed Quotes

#1. Unnecessary customs live a brutally short life in America.

Wilfrid Sheed

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

Wilfrid Sheed

#3. The American male doesn't mature until he has exhausted all other possibilities.

Wilfrid Sheed

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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.

Wilfrid Sheed

#10. Every writer is a writer of the generation before.

Wilfrid Sheed

#11. 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

#12. 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

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

Wilfrid Sheed

#14. One reason the human race has such a low opinion of itself is that it gets so much of its wisdom from writers.

Wilfrid Sheed

#15. I picked up the writing on the very day he died. It was the only consolation I could find.

Wilfrid Sheed

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

Wilfrid Sheed

#17. Even the God of Calvin never judged anyone as harshly as married couples judge each other.

Wilfrid Sheed

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

Wilfrid Sheed

#19. 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.

Wilfrid Sheed

#20. If the French were really intelligent, they'd speak English.

Wilfrid Sheed

#21. 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."

Wilfrid Sheed

#22. Suicide is about life, being in fact the sincerest form of criticism life gets.

Wilfrid Sheed

#23. 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.

Wilfrid Sheed