51 Quotes by Wilfrid Sheed

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.