Irwin Shaw Quotes

Writing is like a contact sport, like football. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it.

When I started out in the early 1930s, there were a great many magazines that published short stories. Unfortunately, the short-story market has dwindled to almost nothing.

Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure; obviously, he was no sissy.

The last paragraph in which you tell what the story is about is almost always best left out.

I never drink while I'm working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober.

Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms.

Writing for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life

The great writers just kept bringing them out. They didn't care if they repeated themselves.

People who light up like Roman candles come down in the dark very quickly.

If football players were armed with guns, there wouldn't be stadiums large enough to hold the crowds.

There are too many books I haven’t read, too many places I haven’t seen, too many memories I haven’t kept long enough.

I haven't stuck to any formula. Most great writers stick to the same style, but I wanted to be more various

Every novelist has a different purpose-and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.

I imagine that my characters have become much more complicated than when I first began, which would be normal

My views naturally have mellowed. Most of the critics have been more or less nice to me

No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys it, even if he doesn't get paid.

At the height of the McCarthy period, writers were being hounded.

If you're young enough, any kind of writing you do for a short period of time is a marvelous apprenticeship.

I don't think that the writer is regarded as a freak by Americans

I'm not as hopeful as I was when I was young

I've gone on the wagon, but my body doesn't believe it.

In the theater, characters have to cut the umbilical cord from the writer and talk in their own voices

A good editor understands what you're talking and writing about and doesn't meddle too much.

Posterity makes the judgments. There are going to be a lot of surprises in store for everybody.

I am forced to say that I have many fiercer critics than myself.

My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever

I look at everything. God gave me eyes and I look at women and men and subway excavations and moving pictures and the little flowers of the field. I casually inspect the universe.

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

You must avoid giving hostages to fortune, like getting an expensive wife, an expensive house, and a style of living that never lets you aford the time to take the chance to write what you wish.

Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form

Kennedy was a man who liked writers and even I got invited to the White House

You have to expect the raps when you have achieved popularity as a writer

In America, we have the feeling of the doomed young artist. Fitzgerald was the great example of that.

In Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he's about 75

Isaac Singer was born in Poland and doesn't write in English. Still, he's an American.

My attitudes have changed, but somebody would have to read all my books to find out how they have

In a novel, it's hard to keep track of everybody

The writer works in a lonely way.

Writing is finally play, and there's no reason why you should get paid for playing

Curiously, the United States is full of writers who have one big work in their life and that's all.

All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one.

I reach my readers regardless of what the critics have written

A writer is a human being. He has to live with a sense of honor.

I never show anything to anybody until I've finished it

My attitudes have changed, but somebody would have to read all my books to find out how they have.

No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys the writing, even if he doesn’t get paid for it.

Now, ' Elias said, 'if only I didn't have to go home to my lousy wife. I married her in 1929. A lot of things've changed since 1929.' He sighed. 'What's a woman?' he asked. 'A Woman is a trap.