Quotes By Irwin Shaw

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

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

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

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.

My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever.

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

The romantic idea is that everybody around a writer must suffer for his talent. I think a writer is a citizen of humanity, part of his nation, part of his family. He may have to make some compromises.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.