Quotes About The Short Story

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. There is no modern literary form which is as little understood as is the short story. The

Charles Raymond Barrett

#5. 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

#6. 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.

#7. Man sees what he knows, not what he sees

Short story, The Mallard

S.L. Northey

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

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

Stephen Harker

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. The short story seems like the best of all possible worlds. I do feel it is closer to writing poetry than to writing a novel, with its requirements of concentration and economy.

James Lasdun

#17. I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

William Faulkner

#18. 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

#19. Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it.

Elizabeth McCracken

#20. The divorce papers remained unopened in the crisp yellow envelope. He had thrown it on his desk without a backward glance. Between his lashes, his dark chocolate eyes burned with fury but there was something else in the depths that she hadn't seen in a long time, passion.

Suzan Battah

#21. It was said of him that he had once been for a short time in Bedlam; they had done him the honour to take him for a madman, but had set him free on discovering that he was only a poet. This story was probably not true; we have all to submit to some such legend about us.

Victor Hugo

#22. But we will not bury our mother. We have no interest in putting her bones in soft ground, no desire for memorials and platitudes, no feelings attached to the organic detritus of her terminated existence.

JY Yang

#23. 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

#24. Baby, don't build a monument for me of your sadness. You wouldn't have wasted your tears when I was alive. Why make an ocean of them now when it's over? The future you dreamed is a dream. Dream something else.

Stephanie Roberts

#25. We all tell our own stories the way we live our lives. My story is: Life is too short to not believe in fresh voices. I don't have Hollywood stars. I have great American artists.

Kevin McCollum

#26. A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.

Will Self

#27. I often think of the novel as a form that celebrates social groups, and the short story being a form that is capable of celebrating an individual or a sort of insular little pair of people.

Antonya Nelson

#28. Smoke rose from the barrel of the gun like a serpent crawling up from its wicker basket

Andrew Lennon

#29. Before World War II, I was living a very cloistered existence, as most cartoonists do. The work I was pouring out did not come from any real, personal life experience; this was all the residue of the accumulation of Rafael Sabatini, O. Henry, all the short-story writers that I'd been reading.

Will Eisner

#30. I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

Neil Gaiman

#31. I bought a selection of short, romantic fiction novels, studied them, decided that I had found a formula and then wrote a book that I figured was the perfect story. Thank goodness it was rejected.

Louise Brown

#32. Youth is marked by a breathtaking novelty that diminishes with each year of age - until life becomes a delusive struggle to break routines, escape the ordinary, and rediscover the joy of discovery.

Zack Love

#33. They were each like a mirror for the other, reflecting the changes in themselves.

Haruki Murakami

#34. [Jorge Luis Borges] had short stories, and I was trying to learn how to write short stories, and then he had these things in the middle that were like fables, and I loved hearing fables.

Sandra Cisneros

#35. Nevertheless we cherish all books, especially the unread ones, for who knows what secrets they might yield one day?
- p.397, as by Larry Zagorski, in his short story "The City of the Sun

Jake Arnott

#36. Who can listen to a story of loneliness and despair without taking the risk of experiencing similar pains in his own heart and even losing his precious peace of mind? In short: Who can take away suffering without entering it?

Henri J.M. Nouwen

#37. Shh, mi amor. The neighbors will hear and call the police.

Kate Richards

#38. That's what I love about the short story. You are naked on the page. There is nowhere to hide.

Jay Caselberg

#39. When the emergency brappers went of they did what any dedicated, well-trained and quick-minded Service personnel would do; they paniced.

From the short story What Makes Us Human.

Stephen R. Donaldson

#40. Oh no. I'm not gonna let you leave yet. I'm gonna show you the value of takin' your time to get to work. I probably should have done this a long time ago.

Zack Love

#41. Everybody should read something. Otherwise we all fall down into the pit of ignorance. Many are down there. Some people fall in it forever. Their lives mean nothing. They should not exist. (From the short story, "Charity".)

Charles Baxter

#42. To make a long story short, Cantorian set theory helps unify and clarify math in the sense that all mathematical entities can now be understood as fundamentally the same kind of thing-a set.

David Foster Wallace

#43. I'm very happy - if I can do even a little bit of work to get the short story out more, I'm thrilled.

George Saunders

#44. The Diary of Nancy Grace Part 3 -A Short Story Written by- Starlette Summers

Starlette Summers

#45. I feel with this film that as long as we tell Philomena's story and as long as we're true to her, which Jeff and Steve have already done by writing the story ... we must not sell her short;. She's a most remarkable woman and all my concern was that we must be absolutely true to her story.

Judi Dench

#46. Short stories are great start, but if they are true that's the best start so far in about 222 short stories I have viewed and I have already shared them in the book series Reddit Collection.

Deyth Banger

#47. On the morning after the storm the body of a drowned giant was washed ashore on the beach five miles to the north-west of the city.

J.G. Ballard

#48. 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

#49. (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

#50. Of course you know him. Everyone knows a pear-shaped man.

George R R Martin

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.

Tobias Wolff

#55. All men that are ruined are ruined on the side of their natural propensities, the note concludes.
This is surely true. Yet the vivacity with which he embraces ruin is unexampled, in my experience.

Donald Barthelme

#56. The short story, it's not a step on the way to becoming a novelist.

Stephen Graham Jones

#57. But if your story is about the inner workings of competitive quilting, you'd better make it short and extra witty. People drift off when you stop talking about stuff that isn't, well, them. The

Scott Adams

#58. You know," Daddy said, "it's some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it's others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He's going to be into everything!

Flannery O'Connor

#59. 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

#60. To a man across a thousand years I offer a handshake.
I say to him: Brother, make the story short, for the stretch of a thousand years is short.

Carl Sandburg

#61. Fear is the short road to death and this world,
Changed by the flux of decay:
Survival is the exception for weary men.

From the new book The Waning

Ellen Mae Franklin

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. Perhaps he found it strange being accompanied by a Chinese-Nigerian arms trafficking pirate, but the Irish priest had just followed me silently on board the covert government transport.

Dayo Ntwari

#67. 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.

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. She had a new secret, the strenght of the moon, looking at her

Susan Engberg

#72. I remember clearly the afternoon that she stood at the corner beside the door of the tourist centre in Gdansk.

You Jin

#73. The novels take longer to write than the picture book texts, and they do take a different sort of concentration. However, a very short, simple story that works well is just as exciting to me as any longer and more complex book.

Margaret Mahy

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. I could never live with this man, she thought. I could never get inside his heart. But I might be able to die with him." - ( From the short story "Landscape in Flatiron")

Haruki Murakami

#77. The short-story writer knows that he can't proceed cumulatively, that time is not his ally. His only solution is to work vertically, heading up or down in literary space.

Julio Cortazar

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. I am writing about people who are alive in the city of New York during mid-20th-century America. And these people are like a character in a play or they are figures in a short story or a novel.

Gay Talese

#81. My first short story sale was to a magazine that sat on the story forever ... and never did publish it.

Cullen Bunn

#82. I fell in love with her suddenly, deeply, in the most all-consuming way.

Siobhan Davis

#83. 'Deadline' is the story of a young man forced to discover who he is, and what's important in life, during the short span of his senior year in high school.

Chris Crutcher

#84. 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

#85. She was the curator of her marriage, collector of swift quotes and unremarked-upon sensations.

Laura Furman

#86. I'm actually writing a short story about a photographer who went completely insane trying to take a close up photo of the horizon.

Steven Wright

#87. I came up with a pen and tablet hoping to write an immortal short story, but I've been having a dreadful time with my heroine - I CAN'T make her behave as I want her to behave; so I've abandoned her for the moment, and am writing to you.

Jean Webster

#88. I knew little about short story writing then so it was rough going, but I did find the experience very memorable.

Haruki Murakami

#89. She knew there were only small joys in life
the big ones were too complicated to be joys when you got all through
and once you realized that, it took a lot of the pressure off.

Lorrie Moore

#90. 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

#91. Don't forget to wind the restricted clock and put the confidential cat out.

Kurt Vonnegut

#92. I read somewhere that a man should tell the story of his life at the age of forty, and this deadline is fast approaching as I write these lines, only a few short weeks remain before this ominous birthday arrives.

Juan Gabriel Vasquez

#93. Exactly. You like me. The word you use was like. You'll find someone better than me. Someone you'll love and not just like.

Kristine Cuevas

#94. The hardest thing about writing a script is you finish it, but it doesn't mean anything. It's not like a novel or short story - a script is meant to be made into a movie.

Maggie Carey

#95. Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.

Neil Gaiman

#96. If somewhere I am honest that's in the "On The Record", short story, but can you handle it?

Deyth Banger

#97. I have always loved westerns ... supernatural westerns in particular. One of my first professional short story sales was a horror/western story. It wasn't so great, though, so I'm glad the magazine folded before it saw print.

Cullen Bunn

#98. Anthony honed the razor along the old leather strop and stared intently at the metal blade as it went up and down, flipping back and forth, with the light exploding off of it like a series of quiet, hypnotic explosions.

Jonathan Douglas Duran

#99. I'm glad people see some of the stories that way. I see where they're coming from, although none of the stories are specifically intended to arouse. There is a gender divide on the short story "The Girlfriend Game" - women seem to consider it "sexy" but men usually find it uncomfortable.

Nick Antosca

#100. I have nothing I want to ask you, and if I did, you would probably lie anyway."
"I'm drunk. Drunk people tell the truth."
"Like hell they do. Besides you're not that drunk."
"Then dare me something."
I snorted. "No, because I'm not that drunk, or stupid.

Elizabeth Morgan