Top 100 Quotes About Short Story
#1. You have very short travel blogs, and I think there's a split among travel writers: the service-oriented writers will say, 'Well, the reader wants to read about his trip, not yours.' Whereas I say, the reader just wants to read a good story and to maybe learn something.
Tim Cahill
#2. I have a musical called Goodbye and Good Luck, based on a Grace Paley short story. I also have King Island Christmas, and there are 20 different productions of it this year.
David Friedman
#3. Well, how did you die, then?" the old man finally asked.
"Die?" Matthew threw back. "Are you crazy? I'm not dead. I'm just very late.
J. Tonzelli
#4. 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
#5. The truth is, you have about three paragraphs in a short story, three pages in a novel, to capture that editor's attention enough for her to finish your story.
Nancy Kress
#6. I've never been a believer in fate. I like to think I'm in control, that my life hasn't been plotted out ahead of time. Sometimes all it takes is one wild thought, one brave decision to change everything. This must be one of those times.
Kyle Richardson
#7. 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
#8. I used to write things for friends. There was this girl I had a crush on, and she had a teacher she didn't like at school. I had a real crush on her, so almost every day I would write her a little short story where she would kill him in a different way.
Stephen Colbert
#9. Why ruin my sister's birthday simply because the entire planet was going to hell in a hand basket?
T.C. Boyle
#10. We busted a lot of family secrets with this. But to make a long story short, my parents relationship was built heavily on security issues for my Mom, and when my Dad couldn't provide security, the relationship unraveled.
Kenny Loggins
#11. Read a short story every day. By the end of the week you would have read volumes of stories.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#12. I'm not named after the character,' she said. 'I'm named after the entire opera.
Julie Orringer
#13. I don't have a lot of time. I can give a poem a couple of lines, a short story a paragraph, and a novel a few pages, then if I can stop reading without a sense of loss, I do, and I go on to something else.
Flannery O'Connor
#14. Long story short: I don't know shit about whatever dancing monkey of the moment is amusing the plebes.
Antonio Garcia Martinez
#15. Introductions, that is, belong to the masterpieces and classics of the world, to the great and ancient and accepted things; and I am here introducing a short, small story of my own which appeared in The Evening News about ten months ago.
Arthur Machen
#16. You have to make choices even when there is nothing to choose from.
Peter Zilahy
#17. It's easy to write a short story and frighten people for five pages, but to work at length, when you do it as in 'The Turn Of The Screw' or 'A Christmas Carol,' it's different; you have to build it and build it.
Susan Hill
#18. His love with Lucy bled from his heart as he slipped into a dark despair - a melancholy that only she could sever with her chaste voice and tender kisses. Now in an unreachable darkness, a blindness took hold. A blood lust that would drive him mad for five years hence.
Solange Nicole
#19. Warning: This book is short and right to the point - like the kind of story that gives you whiplash. If you enjoy unbelievable plots, and insta-everything going on, you may enjoy this dirty little read.
Jenika Snow
#20. A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.
Lynn Abbey
#21. 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
#22. I've been many kinds of writers in my career: novelist; tele-playwright; short story writer. As a high-school student, I wrote amateur pieces for fanzines, and I've written for Hollywood.
George R R Martin
#23. A short story is ... frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.
V.S. Pritchett
#24. Put me down."
Of course, the man couldn't hear her. She barely heard the scratchy whisper.
"I said - "
"I heard you, Mrs. McBride, but I'm not putting you down.
MK McClintock
#25. Well, nothing ever ends well for crazy people in small towns.,
Molly D. Campbell
#26. 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
#27. I had never written anything before in my life except maybe in high school when I wrote a short story, and my mother had to put an ending on that.
Nicole Jordan
#28. I really do believe some people are naturally novelists and some people are short story writers. For me, when I was in middle school or high school, I started with novels.
M.K. Hobson
#29. There is no modern literary form which is as little understood as is the short story. The
Charles Raymond Barrett
#30. Writing a short story is a little like walking into a dark room, finding a light and turning it on. The light is the end of the story.
Dan Chaon
#31. It's a long story," I said. "The short version is Diesel and I are pretending to get married, so we can get Kloughn to marry Valerie." "Does Morelli know about this?" "It's pretend." "I'm not even gonna ask if Ranger knows. Poor ol' Diesel here be dead if Ranger knew.
Janet Evanovich
#33. 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
#35. When I first started writing, I did mostly short fiction, and I'd work on a short story and get near to being done and have no idea what I'd work on next, and then I'd panic.
Ann Leckie
#36. I invited Onyx to be my plus one. Of course she was all in when I added that Grandma A had a massive swimming pool and was within a short driving distance to a two-story bookstore.
K.R. Grace
#37. The story is always in service to the characters, and is only as long or short, or neat or ragged as it needs to be.
Stewart O'Nan
#38. Nothing ever really ends. That's the horrible part of being in the short-story business - you have to be a real expert on ends. Nothing in real life ends. 'Millicent at last understands.' Nobody ever understands.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#39. Man, that kind of little honeybee just buzzes from flower to flower."
"Maybe, but honey is sweet, you know?
Colleen Coover
#40. 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
#41. Man sees what he knows, not what he sees
Short story, The Mallard
S.L. Northey
#42. 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
#43. An editor named Kerrie Hughes wanted me to write a short story that brought my fire-spider Smudge from my goblin books into the present-day world. I came up with libriomancy as a way to make that happen.
Jim C. Hines
#44. 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
#45. 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
#47. I did so want to hear a singer. I miss the sound of a woman's voice, the way they look and smell.
J.A. Willoughby
#49. The strikes continue ruthlessly. I brace for each blow, numbering it as the heat subsides, and enjoying her tender exploration of my swollen lips in between. The rhythm pulls me through the assault and, all too soon, I acknowledge the tenth strike.
Felicity Brandon
#50. It is a happiness to wonder;
it is a happiness to dream.
Edgar Allan Poe
#51. To write a short story, you have to be able to stay up all night.
Lorrie Moore
#52. If you're short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.
Karen Russell
#53. My love for you has no depth, its boundaries are ever-expanding. My love and my life with you will be a never-ending story. My love with you is never-ending
M. Christina White
#54. 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
#55. Shaw Centre has restaurants on the fourth floor, where the ACS boy can pull chairs out for her. Girls love this because no one else does it for them, especially not those sotong RI boys.
Justin Ker
#56. A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.
Rebecca West
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. One of the last courses I taught was on the Russian short story, which I love.
Tobias Wolff
#60. But long story short, I didn't start doing stand-up because I wanted to have a TV show or be an actor or even wanted to write sketch comedy. I got into stand-up because I love stand-up.
Demetri Martin
#61. 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
#63. 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
#64. I've been asking you to marry me since we met! What more do you want?
Chayada Welljaipet
#65. That, too, was in the air itself -- a whisper of apology when the smell of the soil carried. There should be pumpkins in the fields, or sunflowers, or the peppers you saw up north. Instead, it was the smell of old earth that the breezes caught, sometimes a tinge of death. Too hard to forget.
Christian Crews
#66. I gulped, mesmerized by his hypnotic eyes and charming, spearmint smile, and uttered something intelligent like,"Uh, huh." ~ from Dragon Flight
J. Keller Ford
#67. The short story is very good at looking at shadow psychologies and how the system breaks down underneath.
Sarah Hall
#69. The American girl isn't ANY girl; she's a remarkable specimen in a remarkable species.
Henry James
#70. 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
#71. Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.
Nell Freudenberger
#72. When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.
George Saunders
#73. You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
Zadie Smith
#74. Readers tend to devour short stories on a newssheet, but would be disinclined to read them in collections
L.P. Hartley
#75. It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things - a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring - with immense, even startling power.
Raymond Carver
#76. If, as I suspect, my body survives by uttering itself over and over again, then I have some questions. If [I] am one word, so are my daughters, so are all of us in strings and loops. Each life is one short word slowly uttered.
Louise Erdrich
#77. Had Elizabeth Bennet known how wildly Darcy's heart beat for her, 'Pride and Prejudice' would barely have made it into a short story. Their torturously slow-burning romance is a classic example of how men and women still struggle to communicate the most basic of emotions.
Mariella Frostrup
#78. 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
#79. The short story narrates the moment when a dark door, long closed, is opened, when a forgotten error is unwittingly repeated, when the fabric of a life is revealed to have been woven from frail and dubious fiber over top of something unknowable and possibly very bad.
Michael Chabon
#81. 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
#82. Well, the whole story is in the book, but the short answer is that I was the first information architect in an organization that was traditionally design-oriented, and I felt I needed a tool to help me gain the trust and support of my colleagues.
Jesse James Garrett
#83. After 'A Suitable Boy,' I didn't write anything, not even a short story. I thought to myself: 'I ought to start writing.' But I can never force myself to write.
Vikram Seth
#84. I like working in children's books because it gives rise to such a variety of jobs. One month it may be a picture book, the next a retelling, the next a play, a short story or the start of the next novel.
Geraldine McCaughrean
#85. 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
#86. I loved 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.' I read it later as an adult, but I loved 'We Have Always Lived in a Castle.' And that brings you around to 'The Lottery.' You can't pretend - it's a lottery in which you draw a name and people die. That's a short story, but it's such an incredible short story.
Suzanne Collins
#87. Really, I think among the many mistakes I've made over my life, one of them was caring so much about the short story.
Charles D'Ambrosio
#88. For a week, you carried my short story all folded up in your jeans pocket, said you felt sorry for the main character in it. That main character was me, of course.
Franki Elliot
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. Halley believed that a kiss was the beginning of a story, the story, good or bad, short or long, of an us, and once begun, you had to follow it through to the end.
Paul Murray
#92. While there may not be a book in every one of us, there is so often a damned good short story.
Jeffrey Archer
#93. 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
#94. I hate complaining to strangers
you can only complain satisfactorily to people you know really well.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#95. One of my favorite writers is short story writer/essayist Jorge Luis Borges, who was blind. I'm not claiming to be anything remotely resembling a talent of Borges' caliber, but he is an inspiration and a proof that one can be a meaningful and successful writer while blind.
Larry Howes
#96. The times have changed and now the story is old, but yet it all remains the same, a victim in the cold.
Stephen Harker
#97. 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
#98. Fiction cannot betray the truth. Though it must try"...As said by Ernest Hemingway in "Blast"...The first short story in "Bullet".
Christopher J. Pumphrey
#100. I feel myself collapse inside as if the life force has been sucked out of me.
Siobhan Davis
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