Quotes By Irwin Shaw

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

My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever.

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

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.

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.

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

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 reach my readers regardless of what the critics have written.

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

A writer has to live with a sense of honor.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

The writer works in a lonely way.

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