Irwin Shaw Quotes

"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."

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

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

"My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure; obviously, he was no sissy."

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

"I reach my readers regardless of what the critics have written."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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