Irwin Shaw Quotes

71 quotes in 639 categories

• No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys it, even if he doesn't get paid.
• Every novelist has a different purpose-and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.
• 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…
• If football players were armed with guns, there wouldn't be stadiums large enough to hold the crowds.
• Writing is like a contact sport, like football. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it.
• 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…
• The writer works in a lonely way.
• I never drink while I'm working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober.
• Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms.
• All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one.
• 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…
• 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…
• A writer is a human being. He has to live with a sense of honor.
• 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.
• Writing is finally play, and there's no reason why you should get paid for playing
• In Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he's about 75
• I haven't stuck to any formula. Most great writers stick to the same style, but I wanted to be more various
• Writing for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life
• In the theater, characters have to cut the umbilical cord from the writer and talk in their own voices

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