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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
Never
Wish
Expensive
Time
Living
Avoid
Like
Write
Fortune
House
Style
Take
Wife
Must
Literature
Hostages

More quotes by Irwin Shaw

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Every novelist has a different purpose-and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.
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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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All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one.
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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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A writer is a human being. He has to live with a sense of honor.
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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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Writing is like a contact sport, like football. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it.
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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?
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I'm not as hopeful as I was when I was young
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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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Writing for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life
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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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Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure obviously, he was no sissy.
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In Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he's about 75
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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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Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms.
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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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