Short Form Quotes

#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 love experimental writing, when it's good, and good examples are much more likely to be found in the short form.

Nicholas Royle

#3. Sometimes ... the short short appears to rest on nothing more than a fragile anecdote which the writer has managed to drape with a quantity of suggestion. A single incident, a mere anecdote - these form the spine of the short short.

Irving Howe

#4. I understand what something short should be like. I understand beauty in that form. If I start extending, somehow I kind of lose my bearings.

George Saunders

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

Charles Raymond Barrett

#6. 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

#7. The stories in Get In Trouble confirm once again that Kelly Link is a modern virtuoso of the form-playful and subversive required reading for anyone who loves short fiction.

Jeff VanderMeer

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. No poet is required to write in stanzas, or indeed in regular forms at all. Coleridge's 'Dejection: An Ode' has a rhyme scheme and sequence of long and short lines that goes without regular pattern, following the mood and whim of the poet. Such a form is known as an irregular ode.

James Fenton

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. To criticize one's country is to do it a service ... Criticism, in short, is more than a right; it is an act of patriotism-a higher form of patriotism, I believe, than the familiar rituals and national adulation.

J. William Fulbright

#14. With short stories, you can always see the whole, but it's just so hard to get everything you want into that small form.

Rebecca Makkai

#15. Every man must have freedom, must have the scope to form, test, and act upon his own choices, for any sort of development of his own personality to take place. He must, in short, be free in order that he may be fully human.

Murray Rothbard

#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. Sultan Khan had become champion of India at Indian chess and he learned the rules of our form of chess at a later date. The fact that even under such conditions he succeeded in becoming champion reveals a genius for chess which is nothing short of extraordinary.

Jose Raul Capablanca

#18. I heaved into being, came out of the stone, the bricks, and other elements, and took form. (Dark City Lights)

Jerrold Mundis

#19. Oikonomia is the science or art of efficiently producing, distributing, and maintaining concrete use values for the household and community over the long run. Chrematistics is the art of maximizing the accumulation by individuals of abstract exchange value in the form of money in the short run.

Wendell Berry

#20. Saving" in short, in the modern world, is only another form of spending.

Henry Hazlitt

#21. The first show that my dad and my mom did together was for, was a comedy series, a short form that went in the middle of late-night news, and then through all of their career, it was always the "Ed Sullivan Show," it was a variety act, my dad was on the "Jimmy Dean Show" for a few years.

Brian Henson

#22. We know that to wage a nuclear war today, for example, would be a form of suicide; or that to pollute the air or the oceans in order to achieve some short-term benefit would be to destroy the very basis for our survival.

Dalai Lama

#23. 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

#24. Walking takes longer ... than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed.

Edward Abbey

#25. The rythms of typing favour short, concise sentences, sentences with oral form.

Marshall McLuhan

#26. My mode of presentation is short-form video - basically I create fast cut, impassioned 'idea explainers' that explode with enthusiasm and intensity as they distill how technology is expanding our sphere of possibility.

Jason Silva

#27. I love the idea that more people would read short fiction. I think it's such a humanizing form. It softens the boundaries between people.

George Saunders

#28. Do not work primarily for money; do your duty to patients first and let the money follow; our life is short, we don't live twice; the whirlwind will pick up the leaves and spin them, but then it will drop them and they will form a pile.

John Hersey

#29. The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.

Edith Wharton

#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. All roads for me lead back to Mozart. In his tragically short life, he breathed new life, fire and meaning into every form of music that existed in his time.

Charles Hazlewood

#33. What have we got?" Ashford said. "Short form."
"It's fucking weird, sir," Chan said.

James S.A. Corey

#34. 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

#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. While democracy in the long run is the most stable form of government, in the short run, it is among the most fragile.

Madeleine Albright

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

Gabrielle Zevin

#39. A song is such a short form ... that 'the slightest flaw seems like a mountain.' And so every song needs to be revised 'til it's close to perfection ... But achieving perfection takes a lot of energy.

Stephen Sondheim

#40. Hot, short, thorough," I said. I hesitated before adding, "Please." It never pays to insult computers that are smart enough to form sentences. Not when they're in control of the locks, and especially when they have the capacity to boil you in bleach.
"Absolutely," said the shower.

Mira Grant

#41. It seems that not being religious is a form of risk-taking, consistent with other patterns of short-sighted behaviour in men.

Rodney Stark

#42. A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.

Bertrand Russell

#43. What we often take to be the new is simply the old under some novel form.

Henry James

#44. George stopped. It was such a short, little question, but she couldn't make her mouth form the sounds.
Mom, what if I'm a girl?

Alex Gino

#45. It is hard to describe to you but I swear it was a fearsome sight. There were not eyes to speak of, but chasms that saw into its dark depths. A shade of a mouth full with phantom teeth. There seemed to be a skull shifting in and out of form beneath the black. Bound together by an unspeakable evil.

Solange Nicole

#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. 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

#48. 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

#49. in a short essay I wrote in 1991, Gardening As Agriculture. In that essay I asserted that gardening should be recognized as a serious and important form of agriculture that functions as an incubator for new farmers and farming methods.

Peter Bane

#50. My [story] outlines are usually about 5-6 pages long. I'm essentially telling myself the story in short form. I try to make it clear who the major characters are, what they want, and what obstacles they face.

Chevy Stevens

#51. Alternate between short films, long form films, with or without stars, small budget or big budget films. Basically a filmmaker needs to be flexible.

Marion Vernoux

#52. I took an improv class in 2005 in Chicago at ComedySportz, which was short-form, more of a games-based improv. I remember it being real fun and helping with my stand-up. If I did an improv class, and then I did stand-up later, I felt looser on stage and more comfortable.

Hannibal Buress

#53. Readers who claim a preference for short-form over long often tell me it's because they don't have time to commit to a book-length chunk of writing.

Lynn Coady

#54. 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

#55. (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

#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. Ball teams do not always run true to form in a short series. In a season's campaign, class will tell; the best team will invariably win, unless disaster overtakes it. In a short series, some freak situation, same unusual play, may prove to be the turning point.

Billy Evans

#58. Vampires, fey folk, werewolves, Shadowhunters, and demons - these things made sense to Magnus. But the mundane world - it seemed to have no pattern, no form. Their quicksilver politics. Their short lives ...

Cassandra Clare

#59. My short answer would be that there is no greatest jazz musician of the century. Jazz, like any valid art form, finds its greatness in its expression of the human spirit, and, to me, this can't be reduced to a contest.

Bennie Wallace

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

Isobelle Carmody

#61. Nature's purpose in relation to the visual arts is to provide stimulus not imitation ... From its ceaseless urge to create springs all Life all movement and rhythm time and light, color and mood in short, all reality in Form and Thought.

Hans Hofmann

#62. The best short stories and the most successful jokes have a lot in common. Each form relies on suggestion and economy. Characters have to be drawn in a few deft strokes. There's generally a setup, a reveal, a reversal, and a release.

Geraldine Brooks

#63. There will always be stories that require a feature-length format, and there will always be stories that will be told in short-form.

Andreas Deja

#64. From my earliest years I had always wanted to be a writer. It was not that I had any particular message for humanity. I am still plugging away and not the ghost of one so far, so it begins to look as though, unless I suddenly hit mid-season form in my eighties, humanity will remain a message short.

P.G. Wodehouse

#65. My very first gig was with the Sex Pistols, and it was also our first-ever gig. It was a very short set, and it was at Saint Martins College of Art in 1975. We were opening up for a band called Bazooka Joe, and their bass player at the time was Adam Ant, who went on to form Adam and the Ants.

Steve Jones

#66. After 'Punk'd,' my company Katalyst did a deal with AOL to produce short-form content for the Web. At that time it was a different game. If you got front-page coverage on any popular website, you could probably get a push.

Ashton Kutcher

#67. To be interested in short stories, you have to be interested in fiction as an art form.

Deborah Eisenberg

#68. White angel wings, made up from thousands of short feathers, now surrounded him.

"Uh. Bird?" She pointed dumbly, unable to form a single coherent though more.
"Harpie." He gave her a glare that could have killed.

Constance Sharper

#69. Rowan just asked, "Did you have a favorite form?"
Lysandra's grin was nothing short of wicked. "I liked anything with claws and big, big fangs.

Sarah J. Maas

#70. Apothegms form a short cut to much knowledge.

Thomas Hood

#71. Clear moments are so short.
There is much more darkness. More
ocean than terra firma. More
shadow than form.

Adam Zagajewski

#72. I love film and, particularly, shorts. You don't get to see them often, and they're a great little form, like a short story.

Sarah Waters

#73. Social science virtually abhors the event. Not without reason; the short-term is the most capricious and deceptive form of time.

Fernand Braudel

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

Tobias Wolff

#75. 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

#76. Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form.

Irwin Shaw

#77. There was an era when people would turn on their radio and hear a radio drama. Now, you could be as scared by that as seeing it filmed. In those days, people used to sit by the fire and imagine what they were hearing. Everything is its own art form.

Martin Short

#78. There was a time in my life when I wasn't sure I'd ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person's form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress.

Elizabeth McCracken

#79. Satori is a brief flash. Suddenly the light breaks through. For a short timeless time we experience eternity in its unmanifest form. It's comparable to salvikalpa samadhi.

Frederick Lenz

#80. It's nothing short of a whole new brain ... animated by a different form of thinking and a new approach to life.

Daniel H. Pink

#81. Short form media is reductionist by nature.

Jon Krakauer

#82. In short, if you have any question about whether a particular movie, book, or other form of entertainment is appropriate, don't see it, don't read it, don't participate.

Thomas S. Monson

#83. 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

#84. I have learned nothing in twenty years that would suggest that evil people can be rapidly influenced by any means other than raw power. They do not respond, at least in the short run, to either gentle kindness or any form of spiritual persuasion with which I am familiar.

M. Scott Peck

#85. I don't care if you eat worms and cardboard; if you eat 35% fewer calories, you will lose weight and your cholesterol levels will improve50 in the short run, but that is not to say that worms and cardboard form a healthy diet.

T. Colin Campbell

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

Raymond Carver

#87. I'm not so arrogant to consider mine the only legitimate art form. I can't in one breath make a fuss about someone compartmentalizing music into genre and then in the next accuse advertising and short film of not being art.

Brandi Carlile

#88. Chicago was where I realized that improv is its own thing, its own art form. And through that, you kind of develop a work ethic of not selling it short.

Thomas Middleditch

#89. Platitudes might satisfy for a short time, father - but soon or late, the people will realize they are being fed form without substance. What I tell them must be the truth, and I must believe it, and I must hold to it.

Mercedes Lackey

#90. I have problems with this very extreme form of capitalism where the pendulum has swung so far in one direction, where the focus is completely on the short term, and no one is thinking about the consequences.

Noreena Hertz

#91. I feel like I am very drawn to the short form stuff because it's just fun to be making something, and then, a week later, it's out. I will always be drawn to that kind of thing.

Roman Coppola

#92. And so not only do you have to make that work, you can't really start putting the thing together in any form because some of the shots are very short and obviously many of them take so long, you're waiting months and months and months before you can see if it's going to be working emotionally.

Charlie Kaufman