Top 100 Quotes About The Short Stories
#1. 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
#2. Your biggest influences are the earliest ones. When I was young, I was very influenced by the short stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Brad Holland
#3. The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, Death in the Afternoon - as well as all of the short stories that writers studied for the inner trick of them. But there was no trickery: only the plain words put there as if they had always been there - like pebbles cooled in a river.
Naomi Wood
#4. The short stories tend to be a journalistic gathering of anecdotes that are put together to make something larger.
Chuck Palahniuk
#5. When I went to university in Colorado, I was encouraged to write very innovative, experimental things, and some of the short stories in 'Bearded Ladies' are a little bit experimental.
Kate Grenville
#6. I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.
Amy Bloom
#7. She's as old as the hills, evil as a snake, all malevolence and magic and death.
Neil Gaiman
#8. If the world explore all my dark fantasy, will change for the better.
Alexandar Tomov
#9. A short story is ... frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.
V.S. Pritchett
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. Your body is a jewel box.....the jewel is your soul
Kay Boyle
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. I feel myself collapse inside as if the life force has been sucked out of me.
Siobhan Davis
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels.
Jonathan Coe
#23. The day had begun like any other ordinary day for Barnabas Crackle. That is to say, as extra-ordinarily as his days typically began, which were the usual for our faithful protagonist.
Brooke Warra
#25. I enjoy writing plays most. I haven't written a radio play in a while and I don't write short stories anymore because the process of submitting them depressed me. I really enjoy revising novels, but drafting them can be a pain.
Sefi Atta
#26. I'm not just the sum of how I look although that seems to be a popular opinion, and it infuriates me.
Siobhan Davis
#27. I am drawn to writing books about magic and the supernatural because those are the types of books I like to read. I've written many short stories with realistic settings, and I certainly wouldn't rule out realistic novels in the future!
Cassandra Clare
#28. I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.
P.J. Harvey
#29. You can take the barbarian out of the tavern, but he can take the blood out of your body.
Greg X. Graves
#30. Everything Sholom Aleichem talks about in his plays and his short stories is about people, family, man's relationship with his God, the breaking down of tradition.
Norman Jewison
#31. With short stories, the story-teller must have a story to tell, not merely some sweet prose to take out for a walk
Herbert Gold
#32. A collection of short stories is generally thought to be a horrendous clinker; an enforced courtesy for the elderly writer who wants to display the trophies of his youth, along with his trout flies.
John Cheever
#33. To dive in the darkness, I should dive in the truth, then in images of the world..., then facts, then in books, then listening, then in short stories... that's how I write the horror. It's very complicated.
Deyth Banger
#34. READING, n. The general body of what one reads. In our country it consists, as a rule, of Indiana novels, short stories in "dialect" and humor in slang.
Ambrose Bierce
#35. She kissed him first, and all the rest followed.
Alice Hoffman
#36. I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn't think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.
Paul Auster
#37. I wrote short stories for seven years and used to mail them out. You couldn't send them by e-mail. I called them manila boomerangs. I'd seal the self-addressed stamped envelope inside an envelope and I'd mail it off, and it would come back six weeks later with a rejection letter in it.
Jess Walter
#38. 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
#39. Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.
Neil Gaiman
#40. Around the time I dropped out of college, I decided to start taking what I liked about short stories and apply it to writing songs - to make these things that would change and keep going.
Avey Tare
#41. I live in different worlds. One world where I perform my duty as a part of society. My favorite is my world. The writing's world.
Ria Tumimomor
#42. I was intentionally curbing the impulse to be funny and hiding the ability. I wrote any number of very serious attempts at poems, short stories, novels - horrible. At a certain point, I recognized that it was fun to write dialogue that had a degree of lightness and humor.
Patrick DeWitt
#43. I write all the time. I do artwork that's part of a diary, and I write short stories to go with them pretty much every day.
Mark Mothersbaugh
#44. The four of us got back into the car. In an instant, I distinctly heard a "soundless music". It was the melody of friendship, the sound of a perfectly tuned quartet who got together by chance, four hearts playing in harmony.
You Jin
#45. I don't think I would ever want to be a writer of detective stories - but I would like to be a detective and there is a large deal of detection in the short story.
Mary Lavin
#46. I think that writers have natural canvases, and my canvas, even in short stories, often seems to be the scope of a life.
Lauren Groff
#47. Jim Harrison's novels, John McPhee's nonfiction, Flannery O'Connor's short stories, and the crime novels of John Sandford, Ken Bruen, and T. Jefferson Parker. His books
C.J. Box
#48. The problem with relegating black history to one really short month, the shortest month, is not only are we telling the same stories over and over again - which are amazing, George Washington Carver is incredible, there's nobody like Frederick Douglass - but there are so many.
Karyn Parsons
#49. 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
#50. Misery crouches beside me, ever larger and ever gentler; pain takes an interest, becomes huge and kind; terror flutters up, and it doesn't even frighten me anymore. And that'a the most desolate thing of all.
Joseph Roth
#51. I never even considered writing a career option. I just liked the play of words. I was certainly interested in story, but the stories I was telling then were in narrative verse and prose poems, short and succinct, except for one novel-length poem written in narrative couplets.
Charles De Lint
#52. Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages, black.
Salman Rushdie
#53. The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties, and I think it's how you teach yourself to write.
Jess Walter
#54. Every decade, we get a stunning collection of dynamic, heartbreaking short stories. In the past, those collections came from Barry Hannah, Mark Richard, and Thom Jones.
Chuck Palahniuk
#56. When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.
Joyce Carol Oates
#57. 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
#58. I do write a lot of prose. It's not disciplined enough yet that it's actually become stories, or short stories. The idea of writing a novel seems impossible.
PJ Harvey
#59. Reading fiction - excerpts from National Book Award finalists, winners of the Pen/O. Henry Prize for short stories, or even Amazon bestsellers - has been shown to enhance theory of mind:
Margaret Heffernan
#60. There's little question that short stories, like poetry, don't get the respect they deserve in the culture - but what can you do? Like Canute, one cannot fight the sea, you have to go with your love, and hope one day, things change.
Junot Diaz
#61. Mr Benz, the parapet of an Italian bridge doesn't look like the proper place for you, said Chase.
Stefania Mattana
#62. 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
#63. The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
V.S. Pritchett
#65. The short story form allows evocation, suggestion, implication. Its potency often lies in what it does not say.
Isobelle Carmody
#66. I've published several virtually invisible novels and several dozen even more invisible short stories over the years, all of which give me joy - unlike the cumulative experience of seeking publishers for them!
Scott Bradfield
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. As the wind continued to howl and groan through her decaying body, she began to sing her story.
Ken Liu
#70. So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.
Flannery O'Connor
#72. She had a new secret, the strenght of the moon, looking at her
Susan Engberg
#73. You have to be kind of clued into them, they are a world of their own, and most people find them disappointing because the best short stories are not constructed like novels.
Tobias Wolff
#74. I know now why I stopped writing short stories. It was at the point when I recognised how difficult they were.
Brian Friel
#75. I watch people sometimes, wonder how they can walk around with the weight of what they know.
Cate Kennedy
#76. Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.
V.S. Pritchett
#77. I have spend a lot of time on everything and what's impresses me about people I have written that in short stories as for the whole story, probably it should be here.
Deyth Banger
#78. How is it possible you have caught me off guard, he seemed to ask. Exactly where have I miscalculated the velocities, how have I misjudged the vectors?
Stephanie Vaughn
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. My short stories are like soft shadows I have set out in the world, faint footprints I have left. I remember exactly where I set down each and every one of them, and how I felt when I did. Short stories are like guideposts to my heart ...
Haruki Murakami
#83. Though my short stories are the more readable, my novels do have more to say; and they will, if anyone has the patience for it, repay a rereading.
R.A. Lafferty
#84. The cell door opened. My hands went to my eyes. Why was the door opened? I wasn't dead yet. I think.
Paul W.S. Bowler
#85. Having made films, I know very well that the scope of the average 90- to 120-minute movie is about the same narrative heft as a long short story or a novella.
Paul Auster
#86. Upon returning home, she immediately donned the long, silky gloves and was immediately transported to a time of her youth, a time no one in town could ever recall, for it never occurred to anyone who knew her that she had ever been young.
Brooke Warra
#87. Obviously not a Stephen King level writer, but I'd written short stories and short fiction, from the time I was 12.
Mick Garris
#88. I don't know what the definition of a short story is, and I don't even care to answer that question. That's something somebody in academia would think about. I just want to tell a story, and if people listen, and if it stays with you, it's a story.
Sandra Cisneros
#89. Most stories in 'True Blood' take place over a short amount of time. I think the entire three seasons of the show have only spanned a month and a half of those characters' lives.
Michael McMillian
#91. Requiems for the Departed contains seventeen short stories, inspired by Irish mythology, from some of the finest contemporary writers in the business.
Gerard Brennan
#92. I was incredibly determined - I wrote short stories, I wrote the beginnings of novels. I wrote a little children's book and sent it to the editor-in-chief of the children's division of Simon and Schuster and she asked me to write a little children's book for a series she was doing.
Candace Bushnell
#93. 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
#94. I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice.
Andre Dubus
#95. I only like naturalistic stories. I love short, fantastic stories that cast a spell over the reader, that transport you instantly to another place with another set of rules, somewhere imagined by someone else.
Nicholas Royle
#96. Rueful, bittersweet, funny, written with tenderness and bite, Merrill Feitell's stories, like so many classic short stories, are made from the plain and painful stuff of this world, and haunted by the possibility, and the impossibility, of a better one.
Michael Chabon
#97. I hate that I got dealt shitty parents! I hate how you make me feel like scum! I hate that you're always running away from me! And I hate that I ever fucking gave you the power to destroy me!
Adriana Law
#98. The wheel turns for all, caro Chase. It's the karma effect, Giulia cried, aping Ilenia. She could have never imagined that her words would become prophetic so soon.
Stefania Mattana
#99. 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
#100. As an actor, there is room for a certain amount of creativity, but you're always ultimately going to be saying somebody else's words. I don't think I'd have the stamina, skill or ability to write a novel, but I'd love to write short stories and poetry, because those are my two passions.
Daniel Radcliffe
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