Frases de Wilfrid Sheed

Wilfrid Sheed era novelista estadounidense.

✵ 27. diciembre 1930 – 19. enero 2011

Wilfrid Sheed: 50 citas0 Me gusta

Wilfrid Sheed: Frases en inglés

“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.”

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"V. S. Pritchett: Midnight Oil," p. 224
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“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.”

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"Now That Men Can Cry...," p. 296
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“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.”

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"Unnecessary Roughness" (1971), p. 150
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“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.”

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"A Fun-House Mirror" (1972), pp. 107-108
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“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.”

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Walker Percy Redivivus" (1971), p. 130
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“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.”

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"Spock Mugged" (1973), p. 91
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

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

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"The Wit of George S. Kaufman and Dorothy Parker," p. 160
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“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.”

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"Howe's Complaint" (1973), p. 15
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“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.”

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"The Wit of George S. Kaufman and Dorothy Parker" (1973) p. 159
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“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.”

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"Chicago on My Mind" (1973), p. 266
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“The bad debater never knows that one explanation is better than five.”

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"The Aesthetics of Politics," p. 155
Essays in Disguise (1990)

“Baseball fans are pedants, there is no other kind.”

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"Why Can't the Movies Play Ball?," The New York Times (1989-05-14)

“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.”

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"Hard Times for Poets," p. 85
Essays in Disguise (1990)

“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.”

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"A Moral Problem" (1974), p. 88
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

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

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"The Wit of George S. Kaufman and Dorothy Parker," p. 162
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“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?”

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"Come on, Big Boy — Let Me See Your Manuscript," review and interview by Herbert Gold, The New York Times (1987-08-02)

“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.”

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"A. Alvarez: The Savage God" (1972), p. 69
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“A Broadway play is so much an event, designed down to the bit parts to explode in your face on one particular night, that it is hard to judge any one of them fairly from the scrawny instructions known as a script.”

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Clare Boothe Luce http://books.google.com/books?id=mVYfAQAAMAAJ&q=%22A+Broadway+play+is+so+much+an+event+designed+down+to+the+bit+parts+to+explode+in+your+face+on+one+particular+night+that+it+is+hard+to+judge+any+one+of+them+fairly+from+the+scrawny+instructions+known+as+a+script%22&pg=PA69#v=onepage (1982)

“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.”

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"James Thurber: Men, Women, and Dogs" (1975), p. 228
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“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.”

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"The Interview as Art," p. 209
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

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

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"James Thurber: Men, Women, and Dogs," p. 228
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“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.”

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"V. S. Pritchett: Midnight Oil," p. 227
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“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.”

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"Program Notes," p. xiv
Essays in Disguise (1990)

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

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"Miami 1972" (1972), p. 283
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“Unnecessary customs live a brutally short life in America.”

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"Now That Men Can Cry..." (1977), p. 290
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“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.”

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"On Keeping Closets Closed" (1973), p. 76
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

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

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"I Am a Cabaret" (1972), p. 203
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

“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.”

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"Honoring Ezra Pound" (1972), p. 59
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

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

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"The Interview as Art" (1976), p. 208
Referring to W. H. Auden
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

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

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"The Aesthetics of Politics," p. 156
Essays in Disguise (1990)

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