"You have to expect the raps when you have achieved popularity as a writer"
About this Quote
Fame, Shaw implies, comes with a receipt stapled to it: criticism, cheap shots, and the occasional gleeful takedown. “Expect the raps” has the clipped fatalism of someone who’s seen how literary culture works when a writer stops being merely good and starts being widely read. Popularity isn’t treated as a neutral fact; it’s a provocation. The line carries a wry, slightly bruised realism about the way success rearranges your relationship to other people’s opinions.
The phrasing matters. “Raps” suggests not thoughtful disagreement but knocks: public scoldings, snide reviews, ideological policing, the kind of commentary that lands less like dialogue and more like a tap on the shoulder from a bouncer. Shaw’s intent is partly cautionary and partly consoling: if you’re surprised by the backlash, you’ve misunderstood the job. The subtext is that approval is never stable; it curdles into suspicion once the audience gets big enough. Popular writers threaten gatekeepers, irritate rivals, and invite a special kind of resentment from readers who equate accessibility with compromise.
Context sharpens the edge. Shaw was a commercially successful, politically entangled American novelist and screenwriter, shaped by mid-century culture wars and the machinery of mass taste. In that ecosystem, being popular could be read as being “for” something suspect: Hollywood, the marketplace, the wrong politics, the wrong class of reader. Shaw’s line isn’t romantic about suffering; it’s pragmatic. If you’ve reached enough people to matter, you’ve also reached enough people to take a swing.
The phrasing matters. “Raps” suggests not thoughtful disagreement but knocks: public scoldings, snide reviews, ideological policing, the kind of commentary that lands less like dialogue and more like a tap on the shoulder from a bouncer. Shaw’s intent is partly cautionary and partly consoling: if you’re surprised by the backlash, you’ve misunderstood the job. The subtext is that approval is never stable; it curdles into suspicion once the audience gets big enough. Popular writers threaten gatekeepers, irritate rivals, and invite a special kind of resentment from readers who equate accessibility with compromise.
Context sharpens the edge. Shaw was a commercially successful, politically entangled American novelist and screenwriter, shaped by mid-century culture wars and the machinery of mass taste. In that ecosystem, being popular could be read as being “for” something suspect: Hollywood, the marketplace, the wrong politics, the wrong class of reader. Shaw’s line isn’t romantic about suffering; it’s pragmatic. If you’ve reached enough people to matter, you’ve also reached enough people to take a swing.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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