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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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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
Song
Cringe
Unpopular
Popular
Critics
Master
Masters
Novel
Literature

More quotes by Irwin Shaw

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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 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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Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure obviously, he was no sissy.
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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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I'm not as hopeful as I was when I was young
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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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My views naturally have mellowed. Most of the critics have been more or less nice to me
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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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Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form
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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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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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I imagine that my characters have become much more complicated than when I first began, which would be normal
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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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All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one.
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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 for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life
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I don't think that the writer is regarded as a freak by Americans
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Every novelist has a different purpose-and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.
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Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms.
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In Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he's about 75
Irwin Shaw