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Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form

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
Trying
Likely
Writers
Begin
Short
Fiction
Literature
Form

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Every novelist has a different purpose-and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.
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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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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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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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The last paragraph in which you tell what the story is about is almost always best left out.
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In Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he's about 75
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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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Posterity makes the judgments. There are going to be a lot of surprises in store for everybody.
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I don't think that the writer is regarded as a freak by Americans
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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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My attitudes have changed, but somebody would have to read all my books to find out how they have
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Writing is like a contact sport, like football. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it.
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A writer is a human being. He has to live with a sense of honor.
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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 for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life
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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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Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure obviously, he was no sissy.
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Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms.
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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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