Pygmalion & Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play

The selected correspondence of Bernard Shaw relating to the play Pygmalion contains 272 letters and entries, written between 1896 and 1950, and edited by a leading contemporary Shavian Vitaly Baziyan. This publication from Androcles and the Lion, Overruled, Pygmalion, Constable and Company Ltd.: London, 1920 is a handmade reproduction from the original edition, and remains as true to the original work as possible. The original edition was processed manually by means of a classic editing which ensures the quality of publications and the unrestricted enjoyment of reading. Here are some inspirational book quotes from the book: 'Pygmalion is essentially a star play: unless you have an actress of extraordinary qualifications and popularity, failure is certain.' 'Pygmalion is my last potboiler. In future I will write plays that will not be understood for 25 years, if ever.' 'Pygmalion is my most steady source of income: it saved me from ruin during the war, and still brings in a substantial penny every week.' 'Am quite sensible, quite able, quite myself, and yet a lad playing with you on the mountains and unable to feel where you begin and I leave off. And if you tell me that you feel like that the sky will not be high enough for me (isnt that a nice Irish phrase?) Heavens! how delicious it is to make love to you!!!!!' ' Very well, go: the loss of a woman is not the end of the world. The sun shines: it is pleasant to swim: it is good to work: my soul can stand alone.' 'Last week a woman poisoned me with a war substitute for cocoa, as a result of which I not only suffered internal convulsions. . . but pitched head foremost down a flight of 17 stairs and landed on a my valuable head, which now looks like a composite of Michael Angelo' Moses and Shakspear…' 'I accused Mrs Patrick Campbell of having given me the dope in a cup of some stuff called Ovaltine, into which she put about half a canister. If I mentioned this in my letter, Ovaltine would get £20,000 damages out of us; and Mrs Campbell would be held up as Mrs Lucretia Borgia.' 'I am a Classic. I have never pretended to be anything else.' '…the amazing fact that I have ever been mistaken for anything else is due solely to the ignorance of literature prevalent among journalists who have no time for reading, and, indeed, no taste for it: an ignorance which enables managers to mutilate, travesty, and misrepresent Shakespear without detection or rebuke…' 'No art can have power for good without having power for evil also. If you teach a child to write, you thereby teach it to forge cheques as much as to write poems.' 'As you very properly say, the whole world is a fool; and I alone am right. Otherwise, what am I?' 'No I dont miss your love-making—and your sonnets! I know you so well Joey—and just how much you appreciated me—and how little—' 'I love you soulfully & bodyfully, properly and improperly, every way that a woman can be loved.' 'You know you always thought me a fool, and …that never did I think your love making other than what it was—sympathy, kindness, and the wit and folly of genius.' 'How much would you know about me if you read what people write about me instead of going to the original?' 'If you are really in love, this will not make you yawn.' 'The more unforeseen the development the better.' 'Trust your inspiration. If you have none, sweep a crossing. No one is compelled to write plays.' 'All film adventurers denounce one another as crooks, mostly quite justly.'

Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and influencer. Shaw is one of only two people in the world to have won both a Nobel Prize for Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938).