9 George Bernard Shaw Quotes on Writing

George Bernard Shaw quotes on writing

19. That proves it's not by Shaw, because all Shaw's characters are himself: mere puppets stuck up to spout Shaw.

34. The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.

211. I often quote myself. I find it adds spice to the conversation.

231. The material of a dramatist is always some conflict of human feeling with circumstances.

247. Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw's prefaces.

     Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

248. Shaw knows at any moment, on any subject, what he thinks, what you will think, what others have thought, what all this thinking entails; and he takes the most elaborate pains to bring these thoughts to light in a form which is by turns abstract and familiar, conciliatory and aggressive, obvious and inferential, comic and puzzling. In a word, Shaw is perhaps the most consciously conscious mind that has ever thought - certainly the most conscious since Rousseau; which may be why both of them often create the same impression of insincerity amounting to charlatanism. Yet it is by excess of honesty that Shaw himself lent color to his representation as an inconsequential buffoon bent on monopolizing the spotlight.

250. Shaw does not merely decorate a proposition, but makes his way from point to point through new and difficult territory.

253. I never read a reply by Shaw that did not leave me in better and not worse temper or frame of mind; which did not seem to come out of inexhaustible fountains of fairmindedness and intellectual geniality; which did not savor somehow of that native largeness which the philosophers attributed to Magnanimous Man.

254. I found many men to whom I felt deeply grateful - especially Guy de Maupassant, Jack London, and H. L. Mencken - but the first man to whom I felt definitely related was George Bernard Shaw. This is a presumptuous or fatuous thing to mention, perhaps, but even so it must be mentioned. ... I myself, as a person, have been influenced by many writers and many things, and my writing has felt the impact of the writing of many writers, some relatively unknown and unimportant, some downright bad. But probably the greatest influence of them all when an influence is most effective - when the man being influenced is nowhere near being solid in his own right - has been the influence of the great tall man with the white beard, the lively eyes, the swift wit and the impish chuckle. ... I have been fascinated by it all, grateful for it all, grateful for the sheer majesty of the existence of ideas, stories, fables, and paper and ink and print and books to hold them all together for a man to take aside and examine alone. But the man I liked most and the man who seemed to remind me of myself - of what I really was and would surely become - was George Bernard Shaw.