Irwin Shaw's Quotes

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

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

It's those damn critics again.

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

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

My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever.

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

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

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

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

The writer works in a lonely way.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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