top of page
.png){kind=small}
"I never drink while I'm working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Creativity quotes
"Imagination is the creative force that through necessity yields solutions to resolve the issues that face us."
"No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist."
"But the detail of the poem shows power akin to genius, and reveals to us that much neglected law of literary history -- that potential genius can never become actual unless it finds or makes the Form which it requires."
"The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal that you can gather votes like box tops is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process."
"And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right."
"We are all artists, painting the world with our thoughts while coloring the universe with our deeds."
"If you ever desire to give birth to anything at all, then you cannot do without solitude."
"Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it."
"Like most arts, the link between the mind and the pen can chain you like an enslaved workaholic. Even on an intended vacation you suddenly have this killer urge to record whatever the vacation may teach."
Explore more quotes by Irwin Shaw
"I imagine that my characters have become much more complicated than when I first began, which would be normal."
"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."
"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."
"All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one."
bottom of page