"Writing is like a contact sport, like football. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it."
"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."
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Source: Irwin Shaw (2013). “Short Stories: Five Decades”, p.68, Open Road Media
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"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."
"I never drink while I'm working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober."
"Writing is like a contact sport, like football. Why do kids play football? They can get hurt on any play, can't they? Yet they can't wait until Saturday comes around so they can play on the high school team, or the college team, and get smashed around. Writing is like that. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it!"
"The last paragraph in which you tell what the story is about is almost always best left out."