Wilfrid Sheed quotes

" One reason the human race has such a low opinion of itself is that it gets so much of its wisdom from writers. " # Writers and Writing # Opinions # Humankind

" 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? " # Writers and Writing # Books - Reading # Loneliness

" Baseball fans are pedants, there is no other kind. " # Baseball # Speakers and Speaking # Music

" It had always been a notion of mine that sanity is like a clearing in the jungle where the humans agree to meet from time to time and behave in certain fixed ways that even a baboon could master, like Englishmen dressing for dinner in the tropics. " # Music # Dress # Work

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

" Carmichael was, like many Americans, a divided soul, part nomad and part homebody, who seemed a little bit at home everywhere, but was probably more so someplace else, if he could just find it. " # Goals # America # Home

" When a reviewer says that Malamud is second only to Bellow, it means he really isn't thinking about either of them. When he's reading Malamud he's thinking about Bellow, and when he's reading Bellow he's thinking about Roth. This is the essence of the ratings game: distraction. Children play it all the time. "Is this the biggest bridge in the world?" "No, it's the third biggest." "Oh." They lose all interest in the bridge. " # Life and Living # Books - Reading # Critics and Criticism

" 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. " # Writers and Writing # Talent # Friends and Friendship

" What he feared most was the blind spot between us and the future, the space between identities where we could get lost forever. " # Fear # Love # Blindness

" The desire not to destroy the palace but to move into it oneself has always been the occupational curse of revolutionaries. " # Revolutions and Revolutionaries # Desire # Death and Dying