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Irwin Shaw Quotes


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 Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he's about 75.

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

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

It's those damn critics again.

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

My attitudes have changed, but somebody would have to read all my books to find out how they have.

My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever.

My views naturally have mellowed. Most of the critics have been more or less nice to me.

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.

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

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.

The great writers just kept bringing them out. They didn't care if they repeated themselves.

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

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.

The writer works in a lonely way.

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.

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.