Daily Inspiration Quote by Irwin Shaw

Kennedy gets cast here less as a policy machine than as a connoisseur of talent, a president whose appetites ran to sentences as much as to power. Irwin Shaw’s line is doing two things at once: flattering JFK’s cultivated image while quietly puncturing the self-mythology that grows around it. “Liked writers” sounds benign, almost wholesome, but it’s also a sly nod to the transactional charm of Camelot. Writers weren’t just reading companions; they were legitimacy, a portable aura of sophistication that could be draped over a young administration eager to look modern, worldly, and historically literate.

Then Shaw slips in the blade: “even I.” It’s self-deprecation with an edge, a way of reminding you that invitation lists are never purely meritocratic. Shaw was no minor figure, but he’d also been politically controversial in the McCarthy era, and he knew how cultural gatekeeping works. The joke is that proximity to power is arbitrarily bestowed, and the arbitrariness is the point. A president who “likes writers” is also a president who knows what writers can do for him: burnish, narrate, romanticize.

The line’s real subject isn’t Kennedy, it’s the uneasy courtship between art and authority. Shaw is admitting he enjoyed the glamour while refusing to sanctify it. That tension is what makes the sentence snap: admiration spoken in the same breath as skepticism, a literate wink at the machinery of prestige.