Irwin Shaw Quotes

“I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?”

— Irwin Shaw

“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.”

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

“All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one.”

— Irwin Shaw

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.

— Irwin Shaw

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.

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

This time it is not a simple, understandable war, within the same culture. This time it is an assault of the animal world upon the house of the human being. I don't know what you saw in Africa and Italy, but I know what I saw in Russia and Poland. We made a cemetery a thousand miles long and a thousand miles wide. Men, women, children, Poles, Russians, Jews, it made no difference. It could not be compared to any human action. It could be compared to a weasel in a henhouse. It was as though we felt that if we left anything alive in the East, it would one day bear witness against us and condemn us. And, now, we have made the final mistake. We are losing the war

— Irwin Shaw

“Our imperfections are the bonds that hold us together. We might as well recognize them.”

— Irwin Shaw

It is always necessary to remain barbarians, because it is the barbarians who always win.

— Irwin Shaw

“Why does a man spend fifty years of his life in an occupation that is often painful? I once told a class I was teaching that writing is an intellectual contact sport, similar in some respects to football. The effort required can be exhausting, the goal unreached, and you are hurt on almost every play; but that doesn't deprive a man or a boy from getting peculiar pleasures from the game.”

— Irwin Shaw

“Now,' Elias said, 'if only I didn't have to go home to my lousy wife. I married her in 1929. A lot of things've changed since 1929.' He sighed. 'What's a woman?' he asked. 'A Woman is a trap.”

— Irwin Shaw

“The abuse of alcohol," Mr. Parrish said in a solemn, preacher-like voice, as he reached for his glass, "is the one thing that puts Man above the animal.”

— Irwin Shaw

“It had been off-hand and flattering, in exactly the proper proportions, and Louise had cleverly erected a thin shield of something that was less than and better than love to protect him from the comic, unending abuse of the Army. And, now, it was probably over. Women, Michael thought resentfully, can never learn the art of being transients. They are all permanent settlers at heart, making homes with dull, instinctive persistence in floods and wars, on the edges of invasions, at the moment of the crumbling of states. No, he thought, I will not have it. For my own protection I am going to get through this time alone ...”

— Irwin Shaw

“A taste of luxury is part of the education of any intelligent human being. It teaches him how unnecessary it is.”

— Irwin Shaw

He was an indifferent Christian but the afternoon called for gratitude and belief.

— Irwin Shaw

I'm older now, I'm a man getting near middle age, putting on a little fat and I still love to walk along Fifth Avenue at three o'clock on the east side of the street between Fiftieth and Fifty-seventh streets, they're all out then, making believe they're shopping, in their furs and their crazy hats, everything all concentrated from all over the world into eight blocks, the best furs, the best clothes, the handsomest women, out to spend money and feeling good about it, looking coldly at you, making believe they're not looking at you as you go past.

— Irwin Shaw

“When I think of New York City, I think of all the girls, the Jewish girls, the Italian girls, the Irish, Polack, Chinese, German, Negro, Spanish, Russian girls, all on parade in the city. I don't know whether it's something special with me or whether every man in the city walks around with the same feeling inside him, but I feel as though I'm at a picnic in this city. I like to sit near the women in the theaters, the famous beauties who've taken six hours to get ready and look it. And the young girls at the football games, with the red cheeks, and when the warm weather comes, the girls in their summer dresses ...”

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

“A writer has to live with a sense of honor.”

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

“At the height of the McCarthy period, writers were being hounded.”

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

It was the most banal idea about a war, Michael knew, that if of fatality, but it was impossible not to think of it, impossible not to think of the casual threads of accident on which we survive to face the next if that comes tomorrow.

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

“The writer works in a lonely way.”

— Irwin Shaw

Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form.

— Irwin Shaw

“Writing is finally play, and there's no reason why you should get paid for playing.”

— Irwin Shaw

“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.”

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

“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.”

— Irwin Shaw