Good Short Stories Quotes

#1. Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories.

Elizabeth McCracken

#2. The rules seem to be these: If you have written a successful novel, everyone invites you to write short stories. If you have written some good short stories, everyone wants you to write a novel. But nobody wants anything until you have already proved yourself by being published somewhere else.

James A. Michener

#3. The short story, its course plotted and its form proscribed, has become too efficient ... but efficiency is not the most, it is perhaps the least, important among the undoubted elements of good literature

Henry Seidel Canby

#4. Somebody will beat both [contents and price] sooner or later because that is good old Free Enterprise, where the consumer benefits from battles between jolly green giants.

Kurt Vonnegut

#5. The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.

V.S. Pritchett

#6. I don't write poetry or short stories. I don't like to write articles usually. I tend to really only want to be focused on writing novels. It's one of the real advantages I've had over the years. I've only been good at one thing. It helps to be limited.

Markus Zusak

#7. Wafa Wanaka, our elders say. Not only does this mean that death is the ultimate peace, it also means that we are not to speak ill of the dead. Once a person has crossed over to the real of the spirits, he takes his transgressions with him, and we speak only of the good. - 'Something Nice from London

Petina Gappah

#8. The truth is that the writers who most influenced me weren't people categorized as crime writers. I'd say I learned more from John O'Hara, who isn't much read today but whose short stories I really admired, and Hemingway, who I think has lasted pretty good.

Elmore Leonard

#9. I had a lot of expectations placed on me because I was already having some success with my short stories. That was not a good situation to be in. That by itself took a long time to overcome.

Jess Row

#10. Ciabattari is a master of transformation as she gives these stories of loss, woe, crisis and collapse the salutary and sometimes bracing pleasures of plain good fiction.
Kirkus Reviews

Jane Ciabattari

#11. God, he was an evil bastard, but boy was he good!

MFR

#12. Although your marrows look very good, it's not them I'm interested in.. (The Honesty Box) Love Potion

Samantha Bacchus

#13. As a reporter, going around, you hear stories you can't prove, which means you can't put them in the newspaper. But they're good stories, and I would jot them down thinking maybe one day I could write that as a short story.

Pete Hamill

#14. Gray Man. The Gray Man was created by Sarah Orne Jewett and appeared in "The Gray Man" (A White Heron and Other Stories, 1886). Jewett also created Lady Ferry. "The Gray Man" is one of Jewett's best supernatural short stories, which means it is very good indeed.

Jess Nevins

#15. Short stories are my favorite art form. A good one is compact and complete, a telling little slice of life, capturing a moment in time that - for the character - defines her, changes her, is the tipping point for all that will follow.

Ellen Klages

#16. Short stories are designed to deliver their impact in as few pages as possible. A tremendous amount is left out, and a good short story writer learns to include only the most essential information.

Orson Scott Card

#17. I still read Hemingway. I still read his short stories because they're so good. He doesn't waste any words.

Elmore Leonard

#18. I love YA, and it's been a really good fit for me. But at some point, I would like to try something else: a collection of short stories, or writing about something other than high school. A lot has happened to me since I was eighteen.

Sarah Dessen

#19. Bentley is a good bee with a shaky sense of direction and an appetite for mayhem. Just don't call him a drone. He hates that.

John Hopkins

#20. I wanted to be a writer, but at the time, I spent my days working a retail job, my nights sleeping in my childhood bedroom, and while I had written short stories here and there, I didn't know how to write good fiction anymore than I knew how to perform good brain surgery.

Anthony Marra

#21. Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories.

Paul Theroux

#22. I want to do some fiction writing, I've had some pretty good luck with short stories, I'd like to do a couple of larger things.

Janis Ian

#23. Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you're a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable.

Neil Gaiman

#24. One of the first lessons that I hope you grasp is that woven into meaningful literature, so tightly that it can't be separated, is a telling lesson, even in stories as short as this one."
"Always?" I ask.
"Always!" she confirms. "Good stories teach!

Camron Wright

#25. When you send off a short story, it sits on the editor's desk in the same pile with stories by the most famous and honored names in present-day writing-and it's not going to be accepted unless it's as good as theirs. (And it'll probably have to be better.)

Daniel Quinn

#26. Once I had started, I discovered the secret pleasure of writing a novel. It's such an immersive, deep commitment. With short stories, you're continually having to start again from scratch, but with a novel you only need one good idea every few years.

Debra Dean

#27. I was a good student, but a speech impediment was causing problems. One of my teachers decided that I couldn't pronounce certain words at all. She thought that if I wrote something, I would use words I could pronounce. I began writing little poems. I began to write short stories, too.

Walter Dean Myers

#28. Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.

W. H. Auden

#29. A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

David Sedaris

#30. The market for short stories is hard to break into, but a magazine editor isn't always looking for big names with which to sell his magazine - they're more willing to try stories by newcomers, if those tales are good.

Eric Brown

#31. A short story is a messenger from beyond mere thought, that wanders the Earth knocking on doors, praying for a soul that will let it in.

Richard Small

#32. You can't kill an idea the way they try to. You can keep it down awhile, but sooner or later it'll come out. Now what you've got to understand is that the wheel's not evil. Never mind what the scared men all tell you. no discovery is good or evil until men make it that way. -The Wheel, John Wtndham

John Wyndham

#33. It's not enough to have good ideas, you need to master their implementation.

Rossi, Luca (2014-06-22). Galactic Energies: Science fiction and fantasy short stories (p. 20). . Kindle Edition.

Luca Rossi

#34. I was also a good writer, by the way. My, you know, my English teacher and writing teacher loved my writing. You know, I wrote short stories and things like that. And they liked them very much.

Robert Barry

#35. I tell writers not to think about writing short stories or novels. Just write one good scene. And then a novel becomes a bunch of good scenes stacked on top of each other.

Joe Hill

#36. Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.

Colm Toibin

#37. Take lots of time for yourself, discovering yourself-pursue not only a profession but other life passions, I always make time to rock climb or hike or write a few short stories. Also, find good people and surround yourself with them. Most importantly, always believe you will, unequivocally.

Sarah Silverman

#38. Others, amounting to four novels and a mess of short stories which I did not think worth preserving, I have done my best to eliminate from the record by refusing all requests for permission to reprint them, and I hope I have done a good job of making them hard to unearth.

Leslie Charteris

#39. You can't write a novel all at once, any more than you can swallow a whale in one gulp. You do have to break it up into smaller chunks. But those smaller chunks aren't good old familiar short stories. Novels aren't built out of short stories. They are built out of scenes.

Orson Scott Card