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Every novelist has a different purpose-and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.

Irwin Shaw

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Irwin Shaw
Age: 71 †
Born: 1913
Born: February 27
Died: 1984
Died: May 16
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Irwin Gilbert Shamforoff
Every
Several
Literature
Purpose
Often
Might
Novelist
Different
Contradictory
Writing
Purposes
Even
Novelists

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A writer is a human being. He has to live with a sense of honor.
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Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form
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All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one.
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Kennedy was a man who liked writers and even I got invited to the White House
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Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure obviously, he was no sissy.
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No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys it, even if he doesn't get paid.
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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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I don't think that the writer is regarded as a freak by Americans
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Writing is like a contact sport, like football. Why do kids play football? They can get hurt on any play, can't they? Yet they can't wait until Saturday comes around so they can play on the high school team, or the college team, and get smashed around. Writing is like that. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it!
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If you're young enough, any kind of writing you do for a short period of time is a marvelous apprenticeship.
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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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In Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he's about 75
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The romantic idea is that everybody around a writer must suffer for his talent. I think a writer is a citizen of humanity, part of his nation, part of his family. He may have to make some compromises.
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Writing for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life
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My attitudes have changed, but somebody would have to read all my books to find out how they have
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I'm not as hopeful as I was when I was young
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I never drink while I'm working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober.
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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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I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?
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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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