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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
Different
Contradictory
Writing
Purposes
Even
Novelists
Every
Several
Literature
Purpose
Often
Might
Novelist

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I'm not as hopeful as I was when I was young
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Writing is like a contact sport, like football. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it.
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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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The last paragraph in which you tell what the story is about is almost always best left out.
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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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Posterity makes the judgments. There are going to be a lot of surprises in store for everybody.
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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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I imagine that my characters have become much more complicated than when I first began, which would be normal
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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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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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Writing for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life
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Kennedy was a man who liked writers and even I got invited to the White House
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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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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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No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys it, even if he doesn't get paid.
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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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My views naturally have mellowed. Most of the critics have been more or less nice to me
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In Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he's about 75
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Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms.
Irwin Shaw