"I have said much of Irwin's ebulience...There was a melancholy streak in him too, as readers of his
novels and short stories know.
He was basically a serious and thoughtful man, but the enthusiastic boy inside the man was irrepressible.
Adam Shaw has suggested to me that a great part of his father's tremendous capacity for enjoyment came
from his novelist's trick of looking at himself from an eshtetic distance: if he saw himself enjoying,
let's say, a drink at a café table in Cannes in the company of two beautiful actresses. he could compare
the successful writer he had become with the poor boy struggling to earn a few dollars for his hard-pressed
family in Brooklyn during the Depression. Certainly Irwin delighted in his success and in the rewards it
brought him. Once, when he and Bob Parrish were co-producing a film (In The French Style, with
Jean Seberg)adapted from two of Irwin's stories, he said to me: "the greatest thing about screenwriting is
that you can write 'Cocktail party: the fifty most beautiful women in Paris are in the room,' and a couple
of months later you'reon the set and there they are, all fifty of them."
From Clem Woods' unfinished biography.