Daily Inspiration Quote by Irwin Shaw

The line reads like a rebuke to the romantic fantasy of the writer as pure brain-in-a-jar, exempt from ordinary ethics. Shaw insists on the opposite: writing is not a priesthood; it is a job done by a person who still has to wake up, pay bills, keep promises, and look people in the eye. The bluntness is the point. By stripping the statement to two short sentences, he refuses the aesthetic alibi that art can launder bad behavior.

“Human being” is doing quiet, surgical work here. It collapses the distance between the author and everyone else, which is also a warning to writers who perform eccentricity as a brand. Then comes “sense of honor,” a phrase that sounds old-fashioned until you remember Shaw’s century: war, propaganda, blacklists, the grinding pressure to tailor your voice to patrons, studios, parties, or markets. Shaw lived through eras when a writer’s integrity wasn’t an abstract virtue but a survival problem. Honor becomes the internal censor you actually want: not prudishness, but a refusal to betray your own witness.

The subtext is that style and success are cheap if the cost is self-contempt. Shaw isn’t arguing that writers must be saints; he’s arguing they can’t afford to be cynics about themselves. A writer trades in empathy, attention, and truth-telling (however fictionalized). If you hollow those out in life, the work eventually shows it, not as scandal but as a thinning of moral imagination. Honor, here, is less about reputation than about keeping your instrument intact.