Marriage Quote by Irwin Shaw

Shaw’s line reads like career advice delivered with a smirk and a bruise. “Hostages to fortune” is an old, almost aristocratic phrase, but he drags it into the mid-century American marketplace where everything, including domestic life, comes with monthly payments. The list is deliberately blunt: wife, house, “style of living.” Not romance, not home, not comfort - expenses. He’s not condemning love so much as the way love gets financialized, turned into a lifestyle package that quietly drafts your future self into service.

The intent is practical and unsentimental: protect the one resource a writer can’t refinance, which is time plus psychological freedom. Shaw is warning that the gravest threat to artistic honesty isn’t censorship from the state; it’s self-censorship induced by overhead. Once you need a certain income to keep the machine running, “what you wish” becomes a luxury item. You start writing toward the safe assignment, the reliable check, the prestige gig that won’t rock the household budget. Risk becomes irresponsible, not daring.

The subtext has a gendered, era-specific edge: “getting an expensive wife” reveals the assumptions of his time, where a wife is framed as a cost center rather than a partner with her own agency and earning power. That dated phrasing is also a tell: Shaw is describing the script he watched swallow artists - success curdling into obligation.

Context matters. Shaw worked across novels, Hollywood, and Broadway, industries where money arrives fast and disappears faster, and where the temptation is to confuse prosperity with independence. He’s arguing the opposite: the more you buy into appearances, the less room you have to tell the truth.