George Bernard Shaw Writing Quotations

Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.

A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

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.

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.

They tell me that So-and-So, who does not write prefaces, is no charlatan. Well, I am. I first caught the ear of the British public on a cart in Hyde Park, to the blaring of brass bands,and this . . . because . . . I am a natural-born mountebank.

I do not waste my time writing pot-boilers: the pot must be boiled, and even my pot au feu has some chunks of fresh meat in it. ...I have no time to boil myself down; and anyhow I could not do so and preserve all the necessary nutriment and the flavoring on which the digestibility depends.

Whenever I see the word Operation, especially Trifling Operation, I at once write off the patient as dead.

As I write, there is a craze for what is called psychoanalysis, or the cure of diseases by explaining to the patient what is the matter with him: an excellent plan if you happen to know what is the matter with him, especially when the explanation is that there is nothing the matter with him.

There is nothing on earth more exquisite than a bonny book, with well-placed columns of rich black writing in beautiful borders, and illuminated pictures cunningly inset. But nowadays, instead of looking at books, people read them. A book might as well be one of those orders for bacon and bran.

The writer who aims at producing the platitudes which are "not for an age, but for all time" has his reward in being unreadable inall ages.... The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only sort of man who writes about all people and about all time.

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.

Go on writing plays, my boy, One of these days one of these London producers will go into his office and say to his secretary, "Is there a play from Shaw this morning?" and when she says, "No," he will say, "Well, then we'll have to start on the rubbish." And that's your chance, my boy.

Write your Sad times in Sand, Write your Good times in Stone.