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.

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

Writing is like a contact sport, like football. Why do kids play football? They can get hurt on any play, can't they? Yet they can't wait until Saturday comes around so they can play on the high school team, or the college team, and get smashed around. Writing is like that. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it!

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Horror would not annoy a soldier any more than the sight of a hammer annoys a carpenter. It is sentimental to pretend that horror is not the tool of the soldier, just as the hammer is the tool of the carpenter. We live off death and the threat of death and we must take it calmly and use it well.... Eventually I came to enjoy killing, as a pianist enjoys the Czerny which keeps his fingers limber for the Beethoven.

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

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

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

The writer works in a lonely way.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I reach my readers regardless of what the critics have written