Irwin Shaw

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

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

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

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

My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever.

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

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

The writer works in a lonely way.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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