Unnecessary customs live a brutally short life in America.
~ Wilfrid Sheed

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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.
~ Wilfrid Sheed

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In modern American style, his job, not his past, defined him.
~ Wilfrid Sheed

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Both of them were artists with highly developed personas, and hence unreliable witnesses to their own pasts.
~ Wilfrid Sheed

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

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

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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.
~ Wilfrid Sheed

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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?
~ Wilfrid Sheed

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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.
~ Wilfrid Sheed

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