Quotes About Short Stories

#1. When you banish me, you who are maryadapurushottham will be writing a law which will render innocent women of coming generations homeless and destitute.

Gita V. Reddy

#2. When you want to say something very important, tell it with a short sentence! There is no time for long stories!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#3. It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time.

Tobias Wolff

#4. Some people become an integral part of our lives; others are ships that pass in the night. Short stories, in fact. My

Ruskin Bond

#5. David Burnett was the son of Martha Foley, who edited the Best American Short Stories series. She hired me to work with David and her to read stories for the anthology.

Terry Southern

#6. It's the first instance where I believe that it might actually be wrong, the first time I feel like a bit of a creep.

Siobhan Davis

#7. That is what a motorcycle road trip is supposed to be about, long miles and short stops in obscure places with interesting people and stories to be heard.

Geoff Smith

#8. I would never have thought my collection of short stories would win the Giller.

Lynn Coady

#9. Read a short story every day. By the end of the week you would have read volumes of stories.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#10. When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.

Paul Theroux

#11. I started off doing fiction in 1993. It didn't occur to me to do nonfiction because it wasn't a thing yet. So I was bumbling around, writing short stories, and then I took a nonfiction workshop, and I realized that this was what I was supposed to do.

Meghan Daum

#12. She's as old as the hills, evil as a snake, all malevolence and magic and death.

Neil Gaiman

#13. It was Chase who had obtained the information from the girl's boyfriend during a party in an Irish pub, simply by using his British friendliness and charm.

Stefania Mattana

#14. 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

#15. One evening, after a particularly terrible row, the prince smashed his princess over the head with an old wooden clock and she tumbled to the floor, dead.

Brooke Warra

#16. What the short story needs above all is for one of the big publishers to get an equivalent series up and running and to support it and promote it.

Nicholas Royle

#17. If the world explore all my dark fantasy, will change for the better.

Alexandar Tomov

#18. A short story is ... frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.

V.S. Pritchett

#19. In the long run, stories are probably no less valuable than money, but in the short run they have their decided

Paul Auster

#20. For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.

Eudora Welty

#21. Children can't help but create: they need to put their mind on the page, they want to paint, to sculpt, to write short stories.

Jonah Lehrer

#22. Imagination is a safety net that catches you. There is no going too far, no need for a safe word inside your mind. This world is your creation.

K. Kiker

#23. Well, Bradbury's a genius. Fahrenheit 451 is one of my favorite books of all time, and The Illustrated Man as a collection of short stories ranks up there. When you read it you realize how influential it is on so many other stories and people.

Zack Snyder

#24. All stories are the sin of their weaver.

Miyuki Miyabe

#25. I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

Tobias Wolff

#26. The weakness of a man is the strength of a woman

Santosh Avvannavar

#27. Yes, it would nice for this fifty year period, this cradle of all vampire short stories in the English language, to include a vampire tale by Edgar Allan Poe. But the sad answer is that Poe never penned a vampire story.

Andrew Barger

#28. Death, is a beautiful conclusion to these short stories, that which we have so interestingly entitled, lives.

Kiar

#29. That's enough naughty girl," you say in a mocking tone, "I am going to put you over my knee and spank you for being such a bad wife tonight. It will hurt, but you're going to enjoy it a lot more than you'll admit ...

Felicity Brandon

#30. The train hit her with the sound of a meat-filled hefty bag smacking the pavement, and the effect was much the same, I guess. (Dark City Lights)

Warren Moore

#31. In short stories there's more permission to be elliptical. You can have image-logic, or it's almost like a poem in that you can come to a lot of meanings within a short space.

Karen Russell

#32. I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.

Anne Fadiman

#33. I'll give you the whole secret to short story writing. Here it is. Rule 1: Write stories that please yourself. There is no Rule 2.

O. Henry

#34. While my favorite book of short stories is Fredrick Brown's 'Nightmares and Geezenstacks,' my favorite single story is 'Sound of Thunder,' by Ray Bradbury.

James Luceno

#35. For a short-story writer, a story is the combination of what the writer supposed the story would likely be about - plus what actually turned up in the course of writing.

Carol Bly

#36. The stories in Get In Trouble confirm once again that Kelly Link is a modern virtuoso of the form-playful and subversive required reading for anyone who loves short fiction.

Jeff VanderMeer

#37. The city was a hive from this height, the people and the yellow cabs moving about in the street below like pre-programmed insects. (Dark City Lights)

David Levien

#38. Fame is an elastic concept, especially in a place like this, where we all know the smell of each other's armpits. - 'The Mupondawana Dancing Champion

Petina Gappah

#39. And yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.

James Joyce

#40. Robert Louis Stevenson ... I'm focusing on the late short stories that I was ignorant of. I always thought he was a boys' author, but he's not at all.

Jane Birkin

#41. I'm a product of the 1970s, so I have a short attention span. You know, I grew up on cartoons and half-hour shows. So the stories that I'm interested in grab my attention very quickly, and they have to keep my attention.

Robert Kurson

#42. Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark ... your words come out, and then nothing ... but I don't think that's why I tend to write novels rather than stories.

Alice McDermott

#43. Maybe the price of forgetting that even in America, even in New York City, when a man back home is talking, you better listen closely.

Brian Koppelman

#44. My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.

Zadie Smith

#45. What I am enjoying about short stories is that almost-tangible moment at the beginning, when there is no idea in my mind what kind of world I am about to enter.

Ann Kingman

#46. The brightest minds in our field have been trying to find a definition of science fiction for these past seventy years. The short answer is, science fiction stories are given as possible, not necessarily here and now, but somewhere, sometime.

Larry Niven

#47. On the other hand, now that I'm not dependent on fiction for my income, I've been writing more short stories despite the fact that there's no real paying market for short horror other than Cemetery Dance.

George Stephen

#48. The function of the Short Story is to be interesting, to convey vivid impressions, an therefore it must, to a degree, work with the evident and superficial thing

Henry Seidel Canby

#49. If you look at my last songs and first short stories, there is a real connection between them.

Kazuo Ishiguro

#50. There's a joy in writing short stories, a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off.

Tobias Wolff

#51. I've written short stories in first person, but you have so much more control writing in third person. Third person, you know what everybody's thinking. First person is very limiting, and I could never sustain a first person novel before.

Tamora Pierce

#52. The writing of a novel or short story or poem or whatever should elevate the audience, not drag the writer down to some level beneath herself. And she - the author - should fight always to prevent that dragging down, especially when the only possible benefit of allowing it to happen is monetary.

Caitlin R. Kiernan

#53. I love creating individual short stories within chapters, but I want to get better at building consistent narratives from start to finish.

David Crabb

#54. I used to take my short stories to girls' homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

Ray Bradbury

#55. I began writing early - very, very early ... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.

Wole Soyinka

#56. You can't learn to write that way - by writing directly for the screen. Wait until you're 30. But in the meantime write 200 short stories. You've got to learn how to write!

Ray Bradbury

#57. Can you write 200 words a day? 100? 50? In six months, 50 words a day is 9,000 words. That's 2-3 short stories. If you did 200 words every day, in three months that's 36,000 words. That's half a short novel.

Holly Black

#58. Heavens protect us from the dress sense of American academics.

Neil Gaiman

#59. I've been asking you to marry me since we met! What more do you want?

Chayada Welljaipet

#60. It was one of those situations I often find myself in while traveling. Something's said by a stranger I've been randomly thrown into contact with, and I want to say, Listen. I'm with you on most of this, but before we continue, I need to know who you voted for in the last election.

David Sedaris

#61. He'd wanted to mend her just like his mother had mended his favorite teddy bear when his arm had come loose after too much play. He offered her his pudding cup instead.

Brooke Warra

#62. I have seldom written a story, long or short, that I did not have to write and rewrite. There are single stories of mine that have taken me ten or twelve years to get written.

Sherwood Anderson

#63. Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.

Nell Freudenberger

#64. Readers tend to devour short stories on a newssheet, but would be disinclined to read them in collections

L.P. Hartley

#65. I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels ... a Library of Congress worth of awful literature.

Seth Grahame-Smith

#66. Your body is a jewel box.....the jewel is your soul

Kay Boyle

#67. Kevin Hart. He's the man! I like his style. He's short, so I can relate. All the stories he tells are real. I respect that, and he's just a really funny dude - great comedy instincts. To do stand-up on a stage for an hour and tell stories and make people laugh is incredible.

Cameron Boyce

#68. A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

Lorrie Moore

#69. Kalyug Briefs :
VOLUME I, II & III
A collection of Short Stories
Central Theme ::
What Your Sow, So Shall You Reap
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Aparna Gangopadhyay

#70. I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.

Stephen Graham Jones

#71. Many people have said to me, "What a pity you had such a big family to raise." "Think of the novels and the short stories and the poems you never had time to write because of that." And I looked at my children and I said, "These are my poems, these are my stories."

Olga Masters

#72. Quote from "Unexpected Tales from the Ends of the Earth":
"The only one everlasting love is the unrealized one. The love to this thing that you'd never had. Behind it is hidden the love to your own ego and feelings".

Alexandar Tomov

#73. It wasn't until I started to read short stories - by people like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, John Updike ... Eudora Welty - that I became excited about the possibilities of writing.

Carol Windley

#74. 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

#75. I write short stories when a little idea occurs to me, that I know isn't a part of a novel that will stand by itself and should be concentrated.

Roddy Doyle

#76. That so much of our experience, or the stereotype which passes for it should be dealt with by means of the short story is perhaps a symptom not unnoticeable elsewhere in the public domain of an unlovely cynicism about human character.

Howard Nemerov

#77. Short stories consume you faster. They're connected to brevity. With the short story, you are up against mortality. I know how tough they are as a form, but they're also a total joy.

Ali Smith

#78. 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

#79. I should add that there are undoubtedly charming Englishmen; I have often met them. But they are rarely our fellow-guests at hotels.

Guy De Maupassant

#80. I imagine that she flushes, seeing him there, for she is at that age when even the most commonplace boys take on a sense of mystery. And this boy is not ordinary. He is wild and he has strange and fanciful perceptions. [p. 153]

Kim Edwards

#81. One day, I decided to be an island. I took off my clothes and walked into the sea, then floated there, bobbing along with the tide, suspended by my inflatable tube and water wings.

Ng Yi-Sheng

#82. The times have changed and now the story is old, but yet it all remains the same, a victim in the cold.

Stephen Harker

#83. In college I wrote for the university newspaper, and I had several short stories published in small press. I think it's just been a natural progression of where to go with the imagination and not have to grow up.

Gabriel Campisi

#84. I always wanted to do a story on the blues that not only reflected its nature and its content, but also alludes to the form itself ... In short, a story that gives you the impression of the blues.

Charles Burnett

#85. I feel myself collapse inside as if the life force has been sucked out of me.

Siobhan Davis

#86. Kelly Link's prose is conveyed in details so startling and fine that you work up a sweat just waiting for the next sentence to land. This is why we read, crave, need, can't live without short stories.

Tea Obreht

#87. When you write a novel you have to live with the characters for a long time. So I prefer short stories. I never wrote anything more than 250 pages.

Ruskin Bond

#88. Songwriters are expanding time rather than compressing time. My short stories tend to be old fashioned, with a beginning, middle and end.

Steve Earle

#89. 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

#90. If you're an American reader, you can love short stories the way other Americans love baseball; this is our game, people! We have more than two hundred years of know-how and knack, of creativity.

Amy Bloom

#91. Life is short. Write naked.

A.D. Posey

#92. I am also working on a couple of short stories for anthologies. This is new to me and I'm enjoying it.

Judith Guest

#93. Oscar Wilde always makes me smile - with respect and admiration. His short stories prove that it is possible to be both sarcastic, even cynical, but deeply compassionate. Just seeing the cover of one of Wilde's books in a bookshop makes me smile.

Orhan Pamuk

#94. So, short stories have an even harder time, because they tend to get read during the day, between other things. They're interstitial. And yet the content of short stories tends to be very much "nighttime" content.

Lorin Stein

#95. All that sweetness makes me feel weird. My sister was never the loving type.

Mary Papas

#96. Everyone has fantasies and the variations in these visions of passion vary widely. It is a natural experience that occurs in every human being. Having a rich fantasy life is not only enjoyable, but psychologically "normal.

K. Kiker

#97. My favorite form is the short story. From an aesthetics stand point you really have to pare down to the bone. You can't write a throw-away scene.

Roger Zelazny

#98. I guess I would say that most of what I've learned about storytelling derives from novels and short stories. I cannot think of a novel or story, or a novelist or story writer, who thinks in terms of three-act structure.

Tom Bissell

#99. I feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when writing a novel, and short stories are more about instant gratification.

Jami Attenberg

#100. With short stories, you can always see the whole, but it's just so hard to get everything you want into that small form.

Rebecca Makkai