Thursday, March 28, 2024 Text is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.

Wilfrid Sheed

« All quotes from this author
 

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.
--
"A Moral Problem" (1974), p. 88

 
Wilfrid Sheed

» Wilfrid Sheed - all quotes »



Tags: Wilfrid Sheed Quotes, Authors starting by S


Similar quotes

 

It was deeply fascinating to watch how strikingly contemporary American audiences from coast to coast found Shakespeare's Othello — painfully immediate in its unfolding of evil, innocence, passion, dignity and nobility, and contemporary in its overtones of a clash of cultures, of the partial acceptance of and consequent effect upon one of a minority group. Against this background, the jealousy of the protagonist becomes more credible, the blows to his pride more understandable, the final collapse of his personal, individual world more inevitable. But beyond the personal tragedy, the terrible agony of Othello, the irretrievability of his world, the complete destruction of all his trusted and sacred values — all these suggest the shattering of a universe.

 
Paul Robeson
 

He who thinks he can have flesh and bones without being subject to any external influence, or any accidents of matter, unconsciously wishes to reconcile two opposites, viz., to be at the same time subject and not subject to change. If man were never subject to change there could be no generation; there would be one single being, but no individuals forming a species.

 
Maimonides
 

The darker the subject, the more light you must try to shed on the matter. And vice versa.

 
Alan Ayckbourn
 

Sex itself only exists in relation to procreation. That's one of the reasons why I sometimes object — and it's just a theoretical objection, but it's worth thinking about — to the whole notion that one calls what people of the same sex do "sexual relations." As a matter of fact, they have precisely turned their back on sexual relations, in order to engage in acts of mutual pleasure that have nothing whatsoever to do with sexuality.

 
Alan Keyes
 

It's only about once in a lifetime that anything sensational ever happens to one, and when it does, you don't want people taking all the colour out of it. I remember at school having to read that stuff where that chap, Othello, tells the girl what a hell of a time he'd been having among the cannibals and what not. Well, imagine his feelings if, after he had described some particularly sticky passage with a cannibal chief and was waiting for the awestruck "Oh-h! Not really?", she had said that the whole thing had no doubt been greatly exaggerated and that the man had probably really been a prominent local vegetarian.

 
P. G. Wodehouse
© 2009–2013Quotes Privacy Policy | Contact