Wilfrid Sheed

"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."

"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."

"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?"

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

"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."

"When a reviewer says that Malamud is second only to Bellow, it means he really isnt thinking about either of them. When hes reading Malamud hes thinking about Bellow, and when hes reading Bellow hes 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, its the third biggest." "Oh." They lose all interest in the bridge."

"Baseball fans are pedants, there is no other kind."

"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."

"The desire not to destroy the palace but to move into it oneself has always been the occupational curse of revolutionaries."

"Censors will try to censor a little bit more each year (because, like editors and other officious people, censors dont feel they are getting anywhere unless they are up and doing)."

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

"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."