A good editor understands what you're talking and writing about and doesn't meddle too much.
- Irwin Shaw Quote

A writer is a human being. He has to live with a sense of honor.
- Irwin Shaw Quote

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

At the height of the McCarthy period, writers were being hounded.
- Irwin Shaw Quote

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

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

I am forced to say that I have many fiercer critics than myself.
- Irwin Shaw Quote

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?
- Irwin Shaw Quote

I don't think that the writer is regarded as a freak by Americans.
- Irwin Shaw Quote

I imagine that my characters have become much more complicated than when I first began, which would be normal.
- Irwin Shaw Quote

I never show anything to anybody until I've finished it.
- Irwin Shaw Quote

I reach my readers regardless of what the critics have written.
- Irwin Shaw Quote

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

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

In America, we have the feeling of the doomed young artist. Fitzgerald was the great example of that.
- Irwin Shaw Quote

In Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he's about 75.
- Irwin Shaw Quote

Isaac Singer was born in Poland and doesn't write in English. Still, he's an American.
- Irwin Shaw Quote

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

My attitudes have changed, but somebody would have to read all my books to find out how they have.
- Irwin Shaw Quote

My views naturally have mellowed. Most of the critics have been more or less nice to me.
- Irwin Shaw Quote

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

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

The great writers just kept bringing them out. They didn't care if they repeated themselves.
- Irwin Shaw Quote

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

The writer works in a lonely way.
- Irwin Shaw 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 Quote

Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form.
- Irwin Shaw Quote

Writing for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life.
- Irwin Shaw Quote

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

You have to expect the raps when you have achieved popularity as a writer.
- Irwin Shaw 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 Quote