Top 100 Quotes About Short Story
#1. I have always loved short stories. I have been at least as influenced by the short story masters as I have been by novelists.
Daniel Woodrell
#2. In late 2001, I contributed a short story called 'Castaways' to an anthology called 'In Laymon's Terms,' which was a tribute to Richard Laymon, who had passed away earlier that year.
Brian Keene
#3. In a short story by Chekhov or a novel by Balzac he found mysteries which, so far as he was aware, did not exist in any spy thriller. 35
Amos Oz
#4. The Diary of Nancy Grace Part 3 -A Short Story Written by- Starlette Summers
Starlette Summers
#5. A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once.
Richard Russo
#6. I think I got spoiled and that writing a short story and getting it published, or writing a novel and getting it published, you pretty much get to do the first, second and third draft yourself without a whole lot of interference.
John Sayles
#7. Certain of Poe's tales possess an almost absolute perfection of artistic form which makes them veritable beacon-lights in the province of the short story.
H.P. Lovecraft
#8. I remember selling my first short story and thinking, Oh my god, I sold something for fifty dollars! That gives me the authority to say I'm a writer and to actually write more things! It legitimized the activity.
Chuck Palahniuk
#9. A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see.
Dan Chaon
#10. E. A. Poe defines a short story as readable in a single sitting. I imagine a "single sitting" was longer back in his day. But I digress again.
Gabrielle Zevin
#11. Have a short story feature two situations, and then let them solve each other.
Gene Wolfe
#12. I once dreamed a whole short story. Wrapped in its peculiar atmosphere, as if draped in clouds, I walked entranced to my desk at about 4 A.M. and typed it on to the screen.
Hilary Mantel
#13. For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.
Lynn Abbey
#14. Every day, a piece of music, a short story, or a poem dies because its existence is no longer justified in our time. And things that were once considered immortal have become mortal again, no one knows them anymore. Even though they deserve to survive.
Elfriede Jelinek
#15. You know, it's sort of common wisdom among New York publishers that short story collections don't make money.
Chad Harbach
#16. Composition is interesting because, in a sense, you always have to let it go. Unless you're a true composer/performer, you're always sending a PDF and then someone else makes it. It's like instructions for a short story, faxed to every English student who's studying it.
Nico Muhly
#17. When I was a kid, the book that I liked the most was 'Aesop's Fables.' There was a version of it that my father read stories to us kids out of. I liked the idea of the short story format.
Mark Mothersbaugh
#18. (The short story) is a form that has all the power of the novel - some would say more - but none of the self-importance.
Joseph O'Connor
#19. Well, to be honest I think I'm a better short story writer than a novelist. Novels I find very hard, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, of conscious thought - whereas short stories slip out painlessly in a few days.
Eric Brown
#20. Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.
Ray Bradbury
#21. San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.
William, Saroyan
#22. Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand; a short story is a romance, a relationship; a novel is a marriage-one has to be cunning, devise compromises, and make sacrifices.
Amos Oz
#23. For me, it's been a treat to interact with authors who were publishing when I was a young reader. Judy Blume once gave me a pep talk at a writing conference. I had a short story featured in the same anthology as Beverly Cleary. Magic.
Cynthia Leitich Smith
#24. A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.
Isabel Allende
#25. The Daily Herald did a short story on a May twenty-fifth accident and named Greg Lucas as the victim.
Joelle Charbonneau
#26. A poet can feel free, in my estimation, to write a poem for himself. Or a painter can paint a painting for himself. You can write a short story for yourself. But for me, comedy by its nature is communal. If other people don't get it, I'm not sure why you are doing it.
Keegan-Michael Key
#27. At 18, my first short story was published - I was paid a penny a word by a science fiction magazine. I continued to write, and five years later I published my first novel, 'Sweetwater.'
Laurence Yep
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. I love stories. But I don't distinguish so much between a short story and a novel. Personally, when I sit down to read a novel or a Chekhov story, I'm seeking the same thing: I'm seeking that same rich portrayal of life in words.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#31. Dylan Nice's Other Kinds is the most extraordinary short-story-col lection debut I have read in years.
It is a book to be memorized.
Gary Lutz
#32. The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout.
Julio Cortazar
#33. We were such fans of Sleepy Hollow, in all of its iterations - growing up with the Disney show, and then Tim Burton's and, obviously, the most important being Washington Irving's short story. It evokes and invokes a very specific feeling and tone.
Alex Kurtzman
#34. While the novel-writer aims at an eminently natural method of transcription, the author of the short story adopts a very artificial one
Henry Seidel Canby
#35. The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one ...
Lawrence Block
#36. Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.
Tobias Wolff
#37. I have a number of friends that try to live off their writing, and there's way more pressure for a hit or to write a certain type of book. You can't do a limited-edition short-story book with drawings unless you don't want to eat anything but ramen.
Joe Meno
#38. I never know exactly where I'm going with a story, whether it's a short story or a novel. If I did I'd soon grow bored of it. The fun, for me, is in the finding out and the making sense of it.
Nicholas Royle
#39. The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
V.S. Pritchett
#40. Like some kind of particularly tenacious vampire the short story refuses to die, and seems at this point in time to be a wonderful length for our generation.
Neil Gaiman
#41. The short story feels like the most natural length for prose fiction, or certainly for the kind of ideas and situations I like to encounter.
Nicholas Royle
#42. The basis of almost every argument or conclusion I can make is the axiom that the short story can be anything the author decides it shall be; ... In that infinite flexibility, indeed lies the reason why the short story has never been adequately defined.
H.E. Bates
#43. In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially.
Ray Bradbury
#44. The short story form allows evocation, suggestion, implication. Its potency often lies in what it does not say.
Isobelle Carmody
#47. Future historians trying to determine what it was like to be alive in fin de millennium America should read the last two decades of O. Henry and Best American short-story collections.
Gary Krist
#48. I think fiction isn't so good at being for or against things in general - the rhetorical argument a short story can make is only actualized by the accretion of particular details, and the specificity of these details renders whatever conclusions the story reaches invalid for wider application.
George Saunders
#49. The short story is still like the novel's wayward younger brother, we know that it's not respectable - but I think that can also add to the glory of it.
Neil Gaiman
#50. A brief short story may require only a few paragraphs after the climax. On the other hand, in his massive novel 'The World According to Garp,' John Irving's denouement consisted of 10 separate sections, each devoted to an individual character's fate and each almost a story in itself.
Nancy Kress
#51. Mother in my first short story is dead, nobody knows how but she is dead and the father somehow madness or who knows from what he decides to start and play with the dead body. It's really a difficult moment.
Deyth Banger
#52. I was a tremendous fan of the original Kenneth Grahame short story, 'The Reluctant Dragon.'
Tony DiTerlizzi
#53. All of my problems are rather complicated - I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It's like a personal therapy.
Manuel Puig
#54. There are fewer established rules in the way you tell a story for commercials than in features. It's a great little short story you get to play with.
Alfonso Cuaron
#55. I studied the short story as part of my creative writing course at university but then set off as a novelist. Generally, there is a sense that even if you want to write short stories, you need to do a novel first.
Sarah Hall
#56. It's difficult to write a really good short story because it must be a complete and finished reflection of life with only a few words to use as tools. There isn't time for bad writing in a short story.
Edna Ferber
#57. I'm a novelist, editor, short story writer. I also teach, and I freelance sometimes as an arts consultant. Most of my books have been published by Warner Books, now known as Grand Central Books.
Nalo Hopkinson
#58. I am the keeper of the beast, though all men harbor a beast in the depths of their heart
callous, calamitous creatures, driven by deviant demands and derisive diligence.
From the short story What Rough Beast
Michael Hibbard
#59. The short story, free from the longuers of the novel is also exempt from the novel's conclusiveness
too often forced and false: it may thus more nearly than the novel approach aesthetic and moral truth.
Edith Wharton
#60. My highest point was the first thing I won, a short story competition in a women's magazine in the Eighties. It was the first time I'd had my writing validated, and the first thing I'd ever shown anyone else.
Kate Atkinson
#61. I never really wanted to be a writer. I know it sounds strange, but I honestly believe that I didn't pick the story; the story has picked me. I've written absolutely no fiction before 'The Immortals of Meluha.' Not even a short story in school - absolutely nothing.
Amish Tripathi
#62. So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.
Flannery O'Connor
#63. Books in the series should be read in the following order. Moon Wreck: First Contact (Short Story) Moon Wreck: Revelations (Short Story) Moon Wreck: Secrets of Ceres (Short Story) The Slaver Wars: Alien Contact (Novel) Moon Wreck: Fleet Academy (Novel) The Slaver Wars: First Strike (Novel)
Raymond L. Weil
#64. Writing the short story is essentially an act of grace. It's not a matter of will so much as trust. I try to let the story do some of the work for me. It knows what it wants to do, say, be. I try not to stand in its way.
Paulette Alden
#65. Short story characters, mine anyway, are usually driven by impulse, not so much by their histories and the choices that they have to make.
Charles Baxter
#66. Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#67. A short story is a writer's way of thinking through experience ... Journalism aims at accuracy, but fiction's aim is truth. The writer distorts reality in the interest of a larger truth.
John L'Heureux
#68. This is no tall story. Nor is it a short story. Indeed, a story cannot be measured, for their realities stretch far beyond a page or one person's life.
Leah Broadby
#69. I loved them all equally, from the short story, to the poem, to the play, for nothing could touch me so deeply as a well-placed word.
Cheryl Anne Gardner
#70. I'm not against White writers writing about Blacks as long as they are as objective as say James McPherson writing about an Irish American janitor in his brilliant short story "Gold Coast."
Ishmael Reed
#71. Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.
James McBride
#72. Among the many queer things about the American economy is this: A writer can get more money for a bungling speech at a bankrupt college than he can get for a short-story masterpiece. What's more, he can sell the speech over and over again, and no one complains.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#73. Always in the short story there is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society ... As a result there is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not often find in the novel
an intense awareness of human loneliness.
Frank O'Connor
#74. I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.
Alice Munro
#75. In all honesty, at that time, I never saw myself as an author ... I was just a Mom in a state of panic, trying to enter a short story contest to win the prize money in order to keep the lights on in my home.
Leslie Banks
#76. If [a short story author's] very initial sentence tend not to the out bringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step.
Edgar Allan Poe
#77. I often say flippantly that the short story is ... shorter; you can be done with it more easily. It's much less of a commitment of time and energy than a big project like a novel or long nonfiction book.
Bobbie Ann Mason
#78. I have had, like most women, a lifelong preoccupation with my weight. My first published short story was a love story between an elderly man and a very young morbidity obese woman.
Lori Lansens
#79. Chekhov - shall I be blunt? - is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.
George Saunders
#80. A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters
Julio Cortazar
#82. There are a couple of utterly important rules to writing anything, whether it's a novel, a short story or a collection of poetry. And they're really the only rules.
1: Quit talking about it and start.
2: Focus and finish it.
Nicholas Trandahl
#83. At the end of every short story the reader should feel as if a cloud has been lifted from the face of the moon.
Michael Chabon
#84. I can write a short story in six words. For sale: baby shoes, never used
Ernest Hemingway,
#85. Crude at first [the short story] received a literary polish in the press, but its dominant quality remained. It was concise and condense, yet suggestive. It was delightfully extravagant - or a miracle of understatement
Bret Harte
#86. I sold my first short story to Pyramid Press, where it was chiseled onto fifteen slabs of granite, and for which I was paid nine goats.
Frank Tuttle
#87. I wrote a novel in my early twenties; I won a high school prize - my short story got published, and I got 50 dollars, which was a huge deal.
Sue Miller
#88. Within a scantily plotted, novella-style narrative (the movie is an adaptation of a short story by Tom Bissell), single shots become story events that mere mention would spoil.
Karina Longworth
#89. When I started out in the early 1930s, there were a great many magazines that published short stories. Unfortunately, the short-story market has dwindled to almost nothing.
Irwin Shaw
#90. My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever.
Irwin Shaw
#91. There is a sort of genre of optimistic science fiction that I like, and I don't think there is enough of. One of my favourites is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, 'The City and the Stars.' It's set in this far future on Earth in this somewhat static society and trying to break out.
Peter Thiel
#92. One night I had a dream and woke up and wrote down the dream. That was my first short story. The dream was a kind of fantasy of me getting revenge on my father.
Dale Peck
#93. Somewhere around the place I've got an unfinished short story about Schrodinger's Dog; it was mostly moaning about all the attention the cat was getting.
Terry Pratchett
#94. I mean, first, almost all writers these days teach because they don't make enough money publishing to live on, to support themselves - people like Tobias Wolff, Anne Beattie, Amy Hempel, Stuart Dybek; a lot of short story writers, for one thing.
Chad Harbach
#95. In anything you write - in a short story, a poem - there has to be a counter-motion; it can't go all in one direction.
Donald Hall
#96. Some photographs are like a Chekhov short story or a Maupassant story. They're quick things and there's a whole world in them. But one is unconscious of it while shooting.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#97. Writers need restrictions. If somebody just says, "Hey, do you want to write a novel, or an article, or a movie, or a short story, you get shut down."
Mitchell Hurwitz
#98. The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
Bernard Malamud
#99. The novel ... creates a bemusing effect. The short story, on the other hand wakes the reader up. Not only that, it answers the primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience.
V.S. Pritchett
#100. Novels are so much unrulier and more stressful to write. A short story can last two pages and then it's over, and that's kind of a relief. I really like balancing the two.
Aimee Bender
