Irwin Shaw Quotes

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The last paragraph in which you tell what the story is about is almost always best left out.

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

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.

I reach my readers regardless of what the critics have written

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Writing for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life