Irwin Shaw Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Irwin Shaw

  Sports, Football, Hurt

  56 Copy quote

• 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

  Flower, Moving, Eye

  Irwin Shaw (2013). “Short Stories: Five Decades”, p.68, Open Road Media

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Giving, Wife

  4 Copy quote

• 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!

  Irwin Shaw

  Life, Sports, Football

  19 Copy quote

• 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.

  Irwin Shaw

  Memories, Book, Long

  Herbert Kline, Irwin Shaw (1985). “New theatre and film, 1934 to 1937: an anthology”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Hands, Punishment

  12 Copy quote

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

  Irwin Shaw

  Football, Gun, Player

  9 Copy quote

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

  Irwin Shaw

  Dark, Light, People

  9 Copy quote

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

  Irwin Shaw

  Literature, Shows, Finished

  4 Copy quote

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

  Irwin Shaw

  Style, Sticks, Stuck

  8 Copy quote

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

  Irwin Shaw

  Hopeful, Young

  7 Copy quote

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

  Irwin Shaw

  Stories, Literature, Lasts

  17 Copy quote

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

  Irwin Shaw

  Sorry, Writing, Feelings

  7 Copy quote

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

  Irwin Shaw

  Literature, Surprise, Judgment

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Glasses, Ideas

  18 Copy quote

• 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

  Romantic, Thinking, Ideas

  4 Copy quote

• I reach my readers regardless of what the critics have written

  Irwin Shaw

  Literature, Rehabilitation, Critics

  4 Copy quote

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

  Irwin Shaw

  Writing, Talking, Editors

  7 Copy quote

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

  Irwin Shaw

  Character, Cutting, Voice

  7 Copy quote

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

  Irwin Shaw

  Figure Skating, Figures, Sissy

  21 Copy quote

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

  Irwin Shaw

  Writing, Literature, Kind

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Sight, Soldier, Hammers

  4 Copy quote

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

  Irwin Shaw

  Writing, Novelists, Different

  8 Copy quote

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

  Irwin Shaw

  Believe, Gone, Literature

  7 Copy quote

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

  Irwin Shaw

  Writing, Finding Yourself, Literature

  12 Copy quote

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