Wilfrid Sheed Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Unnecessary customs live a brutally short life in America.

As you approach the presidency, no one seems worthy of it, since it wasn't designed for a human in the first place.

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

The spiritual life becomes very simple when you're sick.

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."

Every writer is a writer of the generation before.

Baseball fans are pedants, there is no other kind.

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

Mushy reviews are a breach of faith

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

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

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 town is as full as ever of 'characters,' all created by each other.

Books about suicide make lousy gifts.

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).

Mankind has always made too much of its saints and heroes, and how the latter handle the fuss might be called their final test.