Quotes By Irwin Shaw

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

The writer works in a lonely way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

It's those damn critics again.

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

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

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

A writer has to live with a sense of honor.

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

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

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

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

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

My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever.

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