Irwin Shaw Quotes

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.

Hazen had already begun to mix her a martini. She watched approvingly. "Martinis make everything worthwhile, don't they?" she said, smiling at Strand.

In a novel, it's hard to keep track of everybody.

This time it is not a simple, understandable war, within the same culture. This time it is an assault of the animal world upon the house of the human being. I don't know what you saw in Africa and Italy, but I know what I saw in Russia and Poland. We made a cemetery a thousand miles long and a thousand miles wide. Men, women, children, Poles, Russians, Jews, it made no difference. It could not be compared to any human action. It could be compared to a weasel in a henhouse. It was as though we felt that if we left anything alive in the East, it would one day bear witness against us and condemn us. And, now, we have made the final mistake. We are losing the war

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

When I went into the Army, I made up my mind that I was putting myself at the Army's disposal. I believe in the war. That doesn't mean I believe in the Army. I don't believe in any army. You don't expect justice out of an army, if you're a sensible, grown-up human being, you only expect victory. And if it comes to that, our Army is probably the most just one that ever existed ... I expected the Army to be corrupt, inefficient, cruel, wasteful, and it turned out to be all those things, just like all armies, only much less so than I thought before I got into it. It is much less corrupt, for example, than the German Army. Good for us. The victory we win will not be as good as it might be, if it were a different kind of army, but it will be the best kind of victory we can expect in this day and age, and I'm thankful for it.

It is always necessary to remain barbarians, because it is the barbarians who always win.

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.

The world," said Pavone, "will swing to the left. The whole world except America. The world will swing, not because people read Karl Marx, or because agitators will come out of Russia, but because, after the war is over, that will be the only way they can turn. Everything else will have been tried, everything else will have failed. And I am afraid that American will be isolated, hated, backward, we will all be living there like old maids in a lonely house in the woods, locking the doors, looking under the beds, with a fortune in the mattress, not being able to sleep, because every time the wind blows and a floor creaks, we will think the murderers are breaking in to kill us and take our treasure ...

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

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.

I'm not as hopeful as I was when I was young.

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

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

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

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

If the players were armed with guns, there wouldn't be stadiums large enough to hold the crowds.

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

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

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

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

My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The writer works in a lonely way.

I reach my readers regardless of what the critics have written.

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.

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

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

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.

The abuse of alcohol," Mr. Parrish said in a solemn, preacher-like voice, as he reached for his glass, "is the one thing that puts Man above the animal.

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

I never drink while I'm working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober.

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

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

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

A writer has to live with a sense of honor.