Best 52 quotes of Irwin Shaw on MyQuotes

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Every novelist has a different purpose-and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.

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.

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

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

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

If football players were armed with guns, there wouldn't be stadiums large enough to hold the crowds.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I reach my readers regardless of what the critics have written

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

The writer works in a lonely way.

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.

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

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!

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

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.

Cannes was to blame, he told himself defensively. It was a city made for the indulgence of the senses, all ease and sunshine and provocative flesh. “What had he seen, what had he learned? He had seen all kinds of movies, good and bad, mostly bad. He had been plunged into a carnival, a delirium of film. In the halls, on the terraces, on the beach, at the parties, the art or industry or whatever it deserved to be called in these few days was exposed at its essence. The whole thing was there—the artists and pseudo-artists, the businessmen, the con men, the buyers and sellers, the peddlers, the whores, the pornographers, critics, hangers-on, the year’s heroes, the year’s failures. And then the distillation of what it was all about, a film of Bergman's and one of Bunuel's, pure and devastating.

Now,' Elias said, 'if only I didn't have to go home to my lousy wife. I married her in 1929. A lot of things've changed since 1929.' He sighed. 'What's a woman?' he asked. 'A Woman is a trap.