Literary Birthday – 27 February – Irwin Shaw
Irwin Shaw was born on 27 February 1913 and died on 16 May 1984.
Irwin Shaw Quotes On Writing
- 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.
- All writers are the same – they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one.
- Writing is like a contact sport, like football. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it.
- The great writers just kept bringing them out. They didn’t care if they repeated themselves.
- There are too many books I haven’t read, too many places I haven’t seen, too many memories I haven’t kept long enough.
- I cringe when critics say I’m a master of the popular novel. What’s an unpopular novel?
- Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure; obviously, he was no sissy.
- And perhaps it isn’t a bad idea for a young writer to taste failure before success, because he’s going to know a lot more of failure before he’s done.
- I imagine that my characters have become much more complicated than when I first began, which would be normal.
- The last paragraph, in which you tell what the story is about, is almost always best left out.
Irwin Shaw was a prolific American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and short-story author. His written works have sold more than 14 million copies. He is best known for his novels The Young Lions and Rich Man, Poor Man
, was made into a popular miniseries. His stories fit into the genre often characterized as “The New Yorker story“. During his lifetime Shaw won a number of awards, including two O. Henry Awards, a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant, and three Playboy Awards.
Source for Image: Willem van de Poll, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Irwin_Shaw_(1948).jpg
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