Top 40 Irwin Shaw Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The writer works in a lonely way.

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.

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.

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

My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever.

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

It’s those damn critics again.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Special-interest magazines are dangerous places for writers to start out in because the writing quickly falls into a routine and people are likely to find themselves artistically exhausted when they want to work on something of their own.

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

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

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

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

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

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

An absolutely necessary part of a writer’s equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts upon himself.

A writer has to live with a sense of honor.

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

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

I reach my readers regardless of what the critics have written.

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