H. W. Shaw Quotes

I become more convinced that beings from other planets are using the Earth as a lunatic asylum

I learned more from the first stupid woman who fell in love with me than ever my brains taught me.

A married man is a man with a past, while a bachelor is a man with a future.

The great dramatist has something better to do than to amuse either himself or his audience. He has to interpret life.

The trouble with the media is that it seems unable to distinguish between the end of the world and a bicycle accident.

Reviewing has one advantage over suicide: in suicide you take it out on yourself; in reviewing you take it out on other people.

I loathe the mess of mean superstitions and misunderstood prophecies which is still rammed down the throats of children under the name of Christianity.

As people get their opinions so largely from the newspapers they read... But the Press is not free, the newspapers are owned by rich men.

There is nothing in religion but fiction.

If you go to Heaven without being naturally qualified for it you will not enjoy yourself there.

We all go about longing for love: it is the first need of our natures, the loudest cry of our hearts.

The way to deal with worldly people is to frighten them by repeating their scandalous whisperings aloud.

There is the eternal war between those who are in the world for what they can get out of it and those who are in the world to make it a better place for everybody to live in.

I am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist.

Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation.

A man is like a phonograph with half-a-dozen records. You soon get tired of them all; and yet you have to sit at table whilst he reels them off to every new visitor.

A critic is one who leaves no turn unstoned.

A child hasn't a grown-up person's appetite for affection. A little of it goes a long way with them; and they like a good imitation of it better than the real thing, as every nurse knows.

Not everybody is strong enough to endure life without an anesthetic. Drink probably averts more gross crime than it causes.

The price of ability does not depend on merit but on supply and demand.

A serious illness or a death advertises the doctor exactly as a hanging advertises the barrister who defended the person hanged.

Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound, or smell of it

I do not, like the Fundamentalists, believe that creation stopped six thousand years ago after a week of hard work. Creation is going on all the time.

The utmost I can bear for myself in my best days is that I was one of the hundred best playwrights in the world, which is hardly a supreme distinction.

In a living society every day is a day of judgment; and its recognition as such is not the end of all things but the beginning ofa real civilization.

Without music we shall surely perish of drink, morphia, and all sorts of artificial exaggerations of the cruder delights of the senses.

A man has no business to marry a woman who can't make him miserable. It means she can't make him happy.

If you leave your art, the world will beat you back to it. The world has not an ambition worth sharing, or a prize worth handling.

The best bought-up children are those who have seen thier parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the first duty of a parent.

When a heretic wishes to avoid martyrdom he speaks of "Orthodoxy, True and False" and demonstrates that the True is his heresy.

I'm getting more and more isolated as I get on in years. I think people's insanity starts to slowly take over.

There is a great difference between a young man looking for a situation and one looking for work.

The truth sticks in our throats with all the sauces it is served with: it will never go down until we take it without any sauce at all.

Don't think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone. France is alone. God is alone. And the loneliness of God is His strength.

What is the matter with universities is that the students are school children, whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be adults.

The heart of an Irishman is nothing but his imagination

Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? They are more true: they are the only things that are true.

An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile.

Nobody could stand an eternity of Heaven.

A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.

What man really wishes to do he will find a means of doing.

I have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot.

My only policy is to profess evil and do good.

From Mozart I learnt to say important things in a conversational way.

Modern poverty is not the poverty that was blest in the Sermon on the Mount.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

Reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity.

Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.

Syllables govern the world.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?