Irwin Shaw Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Irwin Shaw quote about:
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“Writing is like a contact sport, like football. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it.”
-- Irwin Shaw -
“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 -
“If football players were armed with guns, there wouldn't be stadiums large enough to hold the crowds.”
-- 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 -
“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 Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he's about 75”
-- Irwin Shaw -
“Writing for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life”
-- Irwin Shaw -
“In the theater, characters have to cut the umbilical cord from the writer and talk in their own voices”
-- Irwin Shaw -
“Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form”
-- Irwin Shaw -
“My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever”
-- Irwin Shaw -
“Kennedy was a man who liked writers and even I got invited to the White House”
-- Irwin Shaw -
“I don't think that the writer is regarded as a freak by Americans”
-- Irwin Shaw -
“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”
-- Irwin Shaw -
“I imagine that my characters have become much more complicated than when I first began, which would be normal”
-- Irwin Shaw -
“Writing is finally play, and there's no reason why you should get paid for playing”
-- Irwin Shaw -
“Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure; obviously, he was no sissy.”
-- Irwin Shaw -
“Curiously, the United States is full of writers who have one big work in their life and that's all.”
-- Irwin Shaw -
“Isaac Singer was born in Poland and doesn't write in English. Still, he's an American.”
-- Irwin Shaw -
“No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys it, even if he doesn't get paid.”
-- Irwin Shaw -
“Every novelist has a different purpose-and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.”
-- Irwin Shaw -
“A good editor understands what you're talking and writing about and doesn't meddle too much.”
-- 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 -
“Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms.”
-- 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 -
“A writer is a human being. He has to live with a sense of honor.”
-- 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
