A Quote by Irwin Shaw

No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys it, even if he doesn't get paid. — © Irwin Shaw
No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys it, even if he doesn't get paid.
Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve--hopeless ly he writes in the hope that he might serve--not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.
It's become fashionable these days to say that the writer writes because he is not whole, he has a wound, he writes to heal it, but who cares if the writer is not whole; of course the writer is not whole, or even particularly well.
The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.
You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.
When you're a writer, you have to write these stories, even if you don't get paid
Every writer, to some extent, writes about himself.
Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself.
The thing is - do we really need another writer who writes a book every eighteen months, whether the quality is wonderful or not? I mean, maybe. But I can name twenty off the top of my head who do it. Maybe what we need is a writer like me who goes very slow, as well.
The great message that we call the gospel begins, then, not with us, or our need, or even the meeting of that need, but with the writer of the news and the sender of its heralds: God himself.
I feel sorry for people in power. I feel sorry for the Queen, in a way, that she hasn't had a normal life. It'd difficult for me to hate anyone. Immediately someone's unpopular, I feel sorry for them.
A man who writes well writes not as others write, but as he himself writes; it is often in speaking badly that he speaks well.
I come from a tradition where the writer writes a play for the actors, rather than for himself, and the dialogue is made to work onstage, so it needs actors to help shape it. So you never get a play right straightaway.
You need to keep something for yourself. As a writer, I feel that even more strongly. I feel like I need to be able to freely observe the world. That's the way I like to move through the world; I don't need to be the focus of attention. If I am, it impairs my ability to write and to do what I do.
A writer writes for writers, a non-writer writes for his next-door neighbor or for the manager of the local bank branch, and he fears (often mistakenly) that they would not understand or, in any case, would not forgive his boldness.
The writer who aims at producing the platitudes which are "not for an age, but for all time" has his reward in being unreadable inall ages.... The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only sort of man who writes about all people and about all time.
The writer trusts nothing she writes-it should be too reckless and alive for that, it should be beautiful and menacing and slightly out of control. . . . Good writing . . . explodes in the reader's face. Whenever the writer writes, it's always three or four or five o'clock in the morning in her head.
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