Quotes About The Short Story

#1. 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

#2. 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

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

Charles Raymond Barrett

#4. 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

#5. 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.

#6. 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

#7. The short story is very good at looking at shadow psychologies and how the system breaks down underneath.

Sarah Hall

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. The short story is not as restrictive as the sonnet, but, of all the literary forms, it is possibly the most single-minded. ... at the end there has to be the literary equivalent of the magician's puff of smoke, an outcome that is both startling and anticipated.

Louis Menand

#16. I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.

Bruce Coville

#17. I've never written poetry. I'm not a poet, but I think the nearest you get is either the short story or the novella, in that you can't waste a word. There is no hiding place: everything's got to be seen to relate, and the prose counts.

Susan Hill

#18. For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

William H Gass

#19. The short story is an imploding universe. It has all the boil of energy inside it. A novel has shrapnel going all over the place. You can have a mistake in a novel. A short story has to be perfect.

Colum McCann

#20. My books rustled by like a military of ducks. My mother had never liked my books. She'd said they kept me from real life, by which I think she meant men, or money, or both. Always accusing things of precisely the crimes they hadn't committed.
(From the short story: Once an Empire)

Rivka Galchen

#21. The fact, and the intuition or logic about the fact, are severe coordinates in fiction. In the short story they must cross with hair-line precision.

Louise Bogan

#22. The short story ... is the most democratic of all the arts; anyone may tell a story, and if it is an absorbing one someone will listen.

Hallie Burnett

#23. To the extent that the short story is an art, Sturgeon is the American short-story writer.

Samuel R. Delany

#24. I was writing fiction in my 20s but in a pretty undisciplined way - late at night, maybe, after I'd peeled myself from the walls of a nightclub and crawled home along the gutters. But I slowly became more serious and more devout in my work, and I fell seriously in love with the short story form.

Kevin Barry

#25. You can write when you're dyslexic, you just can't read it. But I started writing short stories as a child and I found the short story format a real nice one. I love short stories and I love short documentaries or short films of any kind.

Billy Bob Thornton

#26. I'd always intended to make 'Far North' straight after 'The Warrior.' We had the rights to the short story, the script was in development, and I knew where I wanted to shoot it. It just took a long time getting the script together and raising the finance.

Asif Kapadia

#27. 'Castaways' was a play on what if a reality show like 'Survivor' was unknowingly set on an island inhabited by a sub-human race of creatures? Readers have often asked me to consider turning the short story into a full-length novel. So I did.

Brian Keene

#28. My first instinct was to cast as close to the short story as possible, but then I realized that I needed actors who could go for it and that they had to function well as a couple in a love story.

Ang Lee

#29. The man is well inside the train before the dreadful truth occurs to me. He is the man from the newspaper. The rapist. My doppelganger. My mirrored doppelganger.
William Wilson in the short story 'Metro' by Steen Langstrup.

Steen Langstrup

#30. When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my training in this medium.

Truman Capote

#31. 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

#32. The events of life have never fallen into the form of the short story or the form of the poem, or into any other form.Yourown consciousnessisthe only formyouneed.

William, Saroyan

#33. A subplot is a distinguishing characteristic of the novel; the short story, for example, does not need subplots.

Darin Strauss

#34. 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

#35. The short story is the art form that deals with the individual when there is no longer a society to absorb him, and when he is compelled to exist, as it were, by his own inner light.

Frank O'Connor

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

Neil Gaiman

#37. We all make mistakes. Keep playing." From the short story, "The Whitewood Kitarra.

Christie Maurer

#38. As a form, the picture book has a similar elegance to the short story.

Gabrielle Zevin

#39. I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story.

Annie Proulx

#40. The London 'Academy' has seen fit recently to scoff at the critics who have been exercising themselves ove rthe so-called art of the Short Story ... But the new Short Story has gained more individuality. It supports the magazines and has invaded the newspapers

Henry Seidel Canby

#41. Into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see it to be, allows for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, immortal longings.

Elizabeth Bowen

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

Jay Caselberg

#43. (from the short story The Honorary Shepherds) ... you can't be kicked out of a faith. Faith starts inside your heart and ends up in eternity. All you can be kicked out of is a building, which is the bus stop of faith, sort of, and what's a building?

Gregory Maguire

#44. 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

#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. It is my belief that we as human beings have a need to tell stories - I think it's evolutionary. So you can think of the short story as a literary form, or you can instead think of stories.

Aleksandar Hemon

#47. 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

#48. What greatly annoys me is sometimes you see the short story being described as a training ground for the novel. Kind of like an apprenticeship. And in lots of ways, it's a far harder form.

Kevin Barry

#49. I would recommend the short story form, which is a lot harder to write since you have to be so careful with words, until there is plenty of time to doodle through a novel.

Anne McCaffrey

#50. I love the short story for being round, suggestive, insinuating, microcosmic. The story has both the inconvenience and the fascination of new beginnings.

Luisa Valenzuela

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. (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

#55. A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.

Isabel Allende

#56. 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

#57. The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout.

Julio Cortazar

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.

V.S. Pritchett

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. The short story form allows evocation, suggestion, implication. Its potency often lies in what it does not say.

Isobelle Carmody

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

Stephen Graham Jones

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.

Flannery O'Connor

#71. 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

#72. 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

#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. 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

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories - I love the short story.

George R R Martin

#80. The short story, on the other hand, is the perfect American form.

Tobias Wolff

#81. In a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter.

Annie Proulx

#82. The short story is the literature of the nomad.

John Cheever

#83. For me, the short story is the depth of a novel, the breadth of a poem, and, as you come to the last few paragraphs, the experience of surprise.

Amy Bloom

#84. The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime

Bernard Malamud

#85. 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

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. Make the short story tremendously succinct - with a very short pulse or rhythm - and the closest selection of detail - in other words summarise intensely and deeply and keep down the lateral development. It should be a little gem of bright, quick, vivid form

Henry James

#89. Knowledge is the comprehensive embodiment of imagination that surfaces in observation and finally ripens through the reinforcement of experience thereby inculcating knowledge. This in fact is the short story of life.

Q.M. Sidd

#90. The short story is a very natural mode of storytelling; most stories can be told quickly. I always think of them as like a tightrope walk - every sentence is a step along the rope, and you can so easily misplace your step and break your neck.

Kevin Barry

#91. My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.

Raymond Carver

#92. 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

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. 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

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

Short story, The Mallard

S.L. Northey

#98. 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

#99. 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

#100. 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