Top 50 Irwin Shaw Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “The writer works in a lonely way.”

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

11. “The war’s not over yet,′ Jordache said. ‘There’s still a lot of idiots waiting that have to be killed.”

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

13. “You’re a good model for a German soldier, except for the hair. You look as though you once had a thought in your head and that’s hard to find.”

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

18. “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

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

21. “I make it a point to look as healthy and attractive as I can at all times,” Boylan had explained to Rudolph. “Even if I don’t see anybody for weeks on end. It’s a form of self-respect.”

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

26. “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

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

29. “Curiously, the United States is full of writers who have one big work in their life and that’s all.”

— Irwin Shaw

30. “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

31. “The modern world, he thought resentfully, prepares you very poorly for the tests it puts you to.”

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

33. “My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever.”

— Irwin Shaw

34. “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

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

38. “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.”

— Irwin Shaw

39. “I don’t think that the writer is regarded as a freak by Americans.”

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

42. “I imagine that my characters have become much more complicated than when I first began, which would be normal.”

— Irwin Shaw

43. “Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms.”

— Irwin Shaw

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

— Irwin Shaw

45. “I am forced to say that I have many fiercer critics than myself.”

— Irwin Shaw

46. “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

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

— Irwin Shaw

48. “I’m not as hopeful as I was when I was young.”

— Irwin Shaw

49. “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

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

— Irwin Shaw