Quotes By Irwin Shaw

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.