Wit & Attitude Quote by Irwin Shaw

Its those damn critics again: a line that lands like a door slammed mid-sentence, equal parts complaint and comic timing. Coming from Irwin Shaw, a novelist who moved between high literary ambition and mass readership, the phrase reads less like wounded vanity than a wary acknowledgment of a permanent third party in the room. The "again" is the tell. Critics are not an occasional nuisance; theyre a recurring weather system, predictable and impossible to schedule around.

The intent is defensive but also strategic. By calling them "damn critics", Shaw performs a familiar artists move: reclaim the narrative before someone else does. He frames criticism as an external interruption to the real work rather than a legitimate audit of it. That matters because Shaw wrote in an era when gatekeepers could shape careers, but also when writers were increasingly public-facing, caught between magazines, Broadway, Hollywood, and the bookstore. The line hints at that crossfire: the artist trying to make something, and the commentary machine showing up to turn it into a verdict.

The subtext is darker than the punchline. "Critics" here arent just reviewers; theyre proxies for cultural authority, class taste, ideological policing. Shaw, often read through politics and realism, knew that reception can become a referendum on the authors identity and motives. The phrase mocks the power critics claim while admitting the power they have: they keep coming back, because theyre part of the apparatus. Writers dont just fight critics; they write with them in mind, even when pretending not to.