George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw, known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic and polemicist whose influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman, Pygmalionand Saint Joan. With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth26 July 1856
CityDublin, Ireland
CountryIreland
My father must have had some elementary education for he could read and write and keep accounts inaccurately
I don't know what to say about this book. The experience on which it is founded is so extraordinary, that an honest record of it should be preserved . . . But it would have driven me mad; and I am not sure that the author came out of it without a slight derangement.
It would positively be a relief to me to dig Shakespeare up and throw stones at him.
You may well ask me why...I took the time to write [books]. I can only reply that I do not know. There was no why about it. I had to: that was all.
Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.
If you do not write for publication, there is little point in writing at all.
My own education has been entirely controversial: that is why I know what I am writing about; and appear eccentric to dogmatically educated Old School Ties whose heads are stuffed with obsolete shibboleths.
You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.
Literature is like any other trade; you will never sell anything unless you go to the right shop.
I do not know what I think until I write it.
The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.
A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.
Just as I cannot remember any time when I could not read and write, I cannot remember any time when I did not exercise my imagination in daydreams about women.
Most of my recent plays were written in the railway train between Hatfield and Kings Cross. I write anywhere, on the top of omnibuses or wherever I may be; it is all the same to me.