Wilfrid Sheed Quotes

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.

As enviable and unreachable as a face in a train window.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

His interviewing self is, or was, an extra person, like the Holy Ghost, generated by self-contemplation.

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

The best comedy is always heartless, an alternative to rational emotion.

In modern American style, his job, not his past, defined him.

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

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.

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