Irwin Shaw Quotes
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All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one.
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Posterity makes the judgments. There are going to be a lot of surprises in store for everybody.
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You have to expect the raps when you have achieved popularity as a writer.
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A writer is a human being. He has to live with a sense of honor.
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It's those damn critics again.
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I don't think that the writer is regarded as a freak by Americans.
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In Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he's about 75.
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Kennedy was a man who liked writers and even I got invited to the White House.
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The great writers just kept bringing them out. They didn't care if they repeated themselves.
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I reach my readers regardless of what the critics have written.
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A writer has to live with a sense of honor.
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Writing for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life.
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In a novel, it's hard to keep track of everybody.
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The writer works in a lonely way.
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An absolutely necessary part of a writer's equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts upon himself.
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I imagine that my characters have become much more complicated than when I first began, which would be normal.
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When I started out in the early 1930s, there were a great many magazines that published short stories. Unfortunately, the short-story market has dwindled to almost nothing.
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Special-interest magazines are dangerous places for writers to start out in because the writing quickly falls into a routine and people are likely to find themselves artistically exhausted when they want to work on something of their own.
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Writing is like a contact sport, like football. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it.
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My views naturally have mellowed. Most of the critics have been more or less nice to me.
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In the theater, characters have to cut the umbilical cord from the writer and talk in their own voices.
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I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?
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You must avoid giving hostages to fortune, like getting an expensive wife, an expensive house, and a style of living that never lets you aford the time to take the chance to write what you wish.
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No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys it, even if he doesn't get paid.