Quotes By Irwin Shaw

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The writer works in a lonely way.

In America, we have the feeling of the doomed young artist. Fitzgerald was the great example of that.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.