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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.

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
Giving
Getting
Hostage
Writing
Chance
Lets
Wish
Expensive
Never
Living
Avoid
Time
Write
Fortune
Like
House
Style
Take
Wife
Must
Literature
Hostages

More quotes by Irwin Shaw

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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.
Irwin Shaw
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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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In Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he's about 75
Irwin Shaw
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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. 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!
Irwin Shaw
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My views naturally have mellowed. Most of the critics have been more or less nice to me
Irwin Shaw
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Kennedy was a man who liked writers and even I got invited to the White House
Irwin Shaw
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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
Irwin Shaw
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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.
Irwin Shaw
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Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form
Irwin Shaw
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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.
Irwin Shaw
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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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The last paragraph in which you tell what the story is about is almost always best left out.
Irwin Shaw
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I don't think that the writer is regarded as a freak by Americans
Irwin Shaw
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I imagine that my characters have become much more complicated than when I first began, which would be normal
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.
Irwin Shaw
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Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure obviously, he was no sissy.
Irwin Shaw
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All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one.
Irwin Shaw
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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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My attitudes have changed, but somebody would have to read all my books to find out how they have
Irwin Shaw