Irwin Shaw

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The writer works in a lonely way.”

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

“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 . . .”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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