Irwin Shaw Quotes
-
Posterity makes the judgments. There are going to be a lot of surprises in store for everybody.
-
I don't think that the writer is regarded as a freak by Americans.
-
It's those damn critics again.
-
The writer works in a lonely way.
-
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.
-
In Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he's about 75.
-
In a novel, it's hard to keep track of everybody.
-
A writer is a human being. He has to live with a sense of honor.
-
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 imagine that my characters have become much more complicated than when I first began, which would be normal.
-
If you're young enough, any kind of writing you do for a short period of time is a marvelous apprenticeship.
-
Kennedy was a man who liked writers and even I got invited to the White House.
-
A writer has to live with a sense of honor.
-
All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one.
-
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 cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?
-
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 for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life.
-
The great writers just kept bringing them out. They didn't care if they repeated themselves.
-
Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure; obviously, he was no sissy.
-
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.
-
My attitudes have changed, but somebody would have to read all my books to find out how they have.