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

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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My views naturally have mellowed. Most of the critics have been more or less nice to me
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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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No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys it, even if he doesn't get paid.
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Writing is like a contact sport, like football. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it.
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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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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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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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Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form
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Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms.
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Writing for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life
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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 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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Every novelist has a different purpose-and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.
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Kennedy was a man who liked writers and even I got invited to the White House
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I don't think that the writer is regarded as a freak by Americans
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A writer is a human being. He has to live with a sense of honor.
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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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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
Irwin Shaw