GEORGE BERNARD SHAW ON “HAVING” A PLAY

Abstract

Presents quotation by George Bernard Shaw in first person account. When I take my pen or sit down to my typewriter, I am as much a medium as Browning's Mr Sludge or Dinglas Home, or as Job or John of Patmos. When I write a play I do not foresee nor intend a page of it from one end to the other: the play writes itself. I may reason out every sentence until I have made it say exactly what it comes to me to say; but whence and how and why it comes to me, or why I persisted, through nine years of unrelieved market failure, in writing instead of in stockbroking or turf bookmaking or peddling, I do not know. You may say it was because I had a talent that way. So I had; but that fact remains inexplicable. What less could Mr Sludge say? or John Hus, who let himself be burnt rather than recant his "I don't know. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)