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In Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he's about 75

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
Literature
Comeback
Improve
Supposed
Europe
Writer

More quotes by Irwin Shaw

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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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Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure obviously, he was no sissy.
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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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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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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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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'm not as hopeful as I was when I was young
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Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form
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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 last paragraph in which you tell what the story is about is almost always best left out.
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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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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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My views naturally have mellowed. Most of the critics have been more or less nice to me
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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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I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?
Irwin Shaw
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A writer is a human being. He has to live with a sense of honor.
Irwin Shaw
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No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys it, even if he doesn't get paid.
Irwin Shaw
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Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms.
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I don't think that the writer is regarded as a freak by Americans
Irwin Shaw