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

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.
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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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My attitudes have changed, but somebody would have to read all my books to find out how they have
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I don't think that the writer is regarded as a freak by Americans
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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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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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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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Posterity makes the judgments. There are going to be a lot of surprises in store for everybody.
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All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one.
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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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I'm not as hopeful as I was when I was young
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Every novelist has a different purpose-and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.
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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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The last paragraph in which you tell what the story is about is almost always best left out.
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Kennedy was a man who liked writers and even I got invited to the White House
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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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Writing is like a contact sport, like football. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it.
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