Quotes About Writing Short Stories

#1. I started off doing fiction in 1993. It didn't occur to me to do nonfiction because it wasn't a thing yet. So I was bumbling around, writing short stories, and then I took a nonfiction workshop, and I realized that this was what I was supposed to do.

Meghan Daum

#2. There's a joy in writing short stories, a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off.

Tobias Wolff

#3. I began writing early - very, very early ... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.

Wole Soyinka

#4. I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.

Haruki Murakami

#5. I feel quite at home writing short stories but nervous and anxious when writing novels, as if the bad time of consecutive failures might arise again.

Charles Baxter

#6. When I first started 'Humans of New York,' I was writing short stories. There were about 50 of them. And, you know, they were a great part of the site, but the photography just started growing so fast that I didn't have time to make them anymore.

Brandon Stanton

#7. 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

#8. I usually have about four books on the go - a bedside book, a lavatory book, a downstairs book, and the book in my study that I read sneakily while I should be writing. Short stories for the lavatory, obviously.

Mal Peet

#9. All my writing-life people kept telling me that I should stop writing short stories and start writing novels: my agent, my Israeli publisher, my foreign ones, my bank manager - they all felt and keep feeling that I'm doing something wrong here.

Etgar Keret

#10. Like many writers, I started by writing short stories. I needed to learn how to write and stories are the most practical way to do this, and less soul-destroying than working your way through a lengthy novel and then discovering it's rubbish.

Kate Atkinson

#11. I tell writers not to think about writing short stories or novels. Just write one good scene. And then a novel becomes a bunch of good scenes stacked on top of each other.

Joe Hill

#12. I think the few writers who influenced me most in writing short stories are Alice Munro and Grace Paley. They're very different, and I can't do what they do, but reading them gives me hope that I'll learn something from them.

Nell Freudenberger

#13. 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

#14. I started writing short stories. I tried writing horror, mystery, science fiction. I joined a little critique group here in town and ran my stories past them. After about three years, I tackled my first novel, Subterranean. It took me 11 months to write.

James Rollins

#15. I had been writing for the 'Late Show' for about four years when I started writing short stories. I had a blast writing the stories because I was writing in a voice more my own, as opposed to a man's. HBO ended up buying four of them. I think that had a direct impact on my decision to write a book.

Jill Davis

#16. You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.

Larry Niven

#17. I think most fiction writers naturally start by writing short stories, but some of us don't. When I first started writing, I just started writing a novel. It's a hard way to learn to write. I don't recommend it to my students, but it just happens that way for some of us.

Andrea Barrett

#18. The great pleasure for me in writing short stories is the fierce, elegant challenge.

Amy Bloom

#19. When I was in college, I wrote poetry very seriously, and then once I had started writing short stories, I didn't go back to poetry, partially because I felt like I understood how incredibly difficult it was.

Elizabeth McCracken

#20. I know now why I stopped writing short stories. It was at the point when I recognised how difficult they were.

Brian Friel

#21. I've always been ambidextrous, writing short stories and novels, and I pretty much have been writing a novel and a handful of short stories every year since '91.

Catherine Ryan Hyde

#22. I am content when writing short stories.

Sarah Mazucci

#23. I can't be reading novels when I'm writing a novel, because somebody's voice creeps in. The hardest thing to do is keep the tone and your attitude over the course of a year or however long it takes.But when I'm writing short stories, which I will be doing shortly, I can read anything I like.

T.C. Boyle

#24. When you banish me, you who are maryadapurushottham will be writing a law which will render innocent women of coming generations homeless and destitute.

Gita V. Reddy

#25. Read a short story every day. By the end of the week you would have read volumes of stories.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#26. I want to do some fiction writing, I've had some pretty good luck with short stories, I'd like to do a couple of larger things.

Janis Ian

#27. 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

#28. All stories are the sin of their weaver.

Miyuki Miyabe

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. On the other hand, now that I'm not dependent on fiction for my income, I've been writing more short stories despite the fact that there's no real paying market for short horror other than Cemetery Dance.

George Stephen

#32. I've written short stories in first person, but you have so much more control writing in third person. Third person, you know what everybody's thinking. First person is very limiting, and I could never sustain a first person novel before.

Tamora Pierce

#33. 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

#34. You can't learn to write that way - by writing directly for the screen. Wait until you're 30. But in the meantime write 200 short stories. You've got to learn how to write!

Ray Bradbury

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. It wasn't until I started to read short stories - by people like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, John Updike ... Eudora Welty - that I became excited about the possibilities of writing.

Carol Windley

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. Life is short. Write naked.

A.D. Posey

#43. All that sweetness makes me feel weird. My sister was never the loving type.

Mary Papas

#44. 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

#45. I feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when writing a novel, and short stories are more about instant gratification.

Jami Attenberg

#46. 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

#47. You need to take some acting classes to learn to hide your huge crush on my husband better

Mary Papas

#48. I've been writing since I was sixteen. At first, I wrote mostly short stories and poetry. The first thing I ever had published was a poem about a football game. It was printed in my local newspaper.

Jerry Spinelli

#49. Once I had started, I discovered the secret pleasure of writing a novel. It's such an immersive, deep commitment. With short stories, you're continually having to start again from scratch, but with a novel you only need one good idea every few years.

Debra Dean

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. I was a good student, but a speech impediment was causing problems. One of my teachers decided that I couldn't pronounce certain words at all. She thought that if I wrote something, I would use words I could pronounce. I began writing little poems. I began to write short stories, too.

Walter Dean Myers

#53. The first writing I did was short short stories for a newspaper syndicate for which I was paid five dollars a piece on publication.

Theodore Sturgeon

#54. I started writing little short stories and poems as soon as I learned to read and write. I think I was six years old. And then when I got to be eleven, twelve, and into my teens, I was just listening to records all the time, and I got a guitar. I started to take guitar lessons when I was twelve.

Lucinda Williams

#55. I'm not a writer. I think I can write short stories and poetry, but film writing, brilliant film writing, is a talent - you can't just do it like that.

Samantha Morton

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. I'm always writing across the same themes. But with short stories, I'm doing something different than with novels. In some ways, they're coming from a much deeper place.

Lynn Coady

#59. A shrink and a patient switching places. Who is REALLY the boss?

Mary Papas

#60. Inspiration for my short stories grows from a psychic kernel, a vision of some sort or an eccentric, colorful dream.

Lawren Leo

#61. I have been tossing around the idea of writing some non-fiction. Maybe a collection of short stories about my experience being a mom and how not to be perfect.

Melissa Peterman

#62. Writing stories was always a bit like falling in love with a stranger and running off to Marrakech for a long weekend. It didn't have to be successful to be thrilling.

Ann Patchett

#63. As to my writing short pieces, there are two reasons I can give you. The first is my invincible laziness. The second is that I've always been fond of short stories, and it always took me some trouble to get through a novel.

Jorge Luis Borges

#64. Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories.

Paul Theroux

#65. Though this child came in with nothing but excess baby fat, chemical brain waves, and mother and son bodily toxins on his legs, he had a fate fit for a modern day demigod.

David Scheier

#66. My father became a mythical figure, more force than man ... he was a force my mother would use as a threat of wrath and punishment." In "Father Close, Father Far" New California Writing

Dagoberto Gilb

#67. She would keep playing the role of the winner as long as the audience believed her.

Mary Papas

#68. I was also a good writer, by the way. My, you know, my English teacher and writing teacher loved my writing. You know, I wrote short stories and things like that. And they liked them very much.

Robert Barry

#69. 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

#70. Even while I was working on the novel I would also write short stories as relief, just to be in a wieldier world that could negotiated more easily and more quickly. In the novel, I even changed the narrator from a man to a woman.

Leni Zumas

#71. [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

#72. When you are falling short in vocabulary to explain the emotion in your story.Than you are writing the right story

Tushar Upreti

#73. 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

#74. He's a hot bath, a short breath, five days of summer pressed into five fingers writing stories on my body.

Tahereh Mafi

#75. I mostly write short stories. They are best written in a continuous creative process. You have a feel of immediacy.

Ruskin Bond

#76. I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I'm writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories.

Eric Brown

#77. Take lots of time for yourself, discovering yourself-pursue not only a profession but other life passions, I always make time to rock climb or hike or write a few short stories. Also, find good people and surround yourself with them. Most importantly, always believe you will, unequivocally.

Sarah Silverman

#78. He's a hot bath, a short breath, 5 days of summer pressed into 5 fingers writing stories on my body.

Tahereh Mafi

#79. 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

#80. You can't write a novel all at once, any more than you can swallow a whale in one gulp. You do have to break it up into smaller chunks. But those smaller chunks aren't good old familiar short stories. Novels aren't built out of short stories. They are built out of scenes.

Orson Scott Card

#81. 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

#82. The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done.

Flannery O'Connor

#83. Have a short story feature two situations, and then let them solve each other.

Gene Wolfe

#84. Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.

Ray Bradbury

#85. The rules seem to be these: If you have written a successful novel, everyone invites you to write short stories. If you have written some good short stories, everyone wants you to write a novel. But nobody wants anything until you have already proved yourself by being published somewhere else.

James A. Michener

#86. 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

#87. Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories.

Elizabeth McCracken

#88. 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

#89. 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

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

V.S. Pritchett

#91. I never wanted to be an editor. I never wanted to be a boss. I just wanted to write, and it didn't make any difference whether it was fiction or nonfiction or short stories or whatever. I just - that's what I was destined to do.

Frank Deford

#92. A shrink and a patient switch roles. Who is really the boss?

Mary Papas

#93. I consider myself a writer. I don't favour any type of writing. I sometimes wish short stories came more easily to me.

James Lasdun

#94. I don't write poetry or short stories. I don't like to write articles usually. I tend to really only want to be focused on writing novels. It's one of the real advantages I've had over the years. I've only been good at one thing. It helps to be limited.

Markus Zusak

#95. 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

#96. Short stories always seem to cost me blood, and I envy the people who do them for fun.

Terry Pratchett

#97. If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?

Jennifer Weiner

#98. Homo Americanus is going to go on speaking and writing the way he always has, no matter what dictionary he owns.

Kurt Vonnegut

#99. The only man she ever loved. And hated.

Mary Papas

#100. Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories ... cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful.

G.K. Chesterton