Short Novels Quotes

#1. Short stories and some short novels are close to poetry
with the fewest words they capture the essence of a situation, of a human being. It's like trying to pin down the eternal moment.

Gina Berriault

#2. I live in Harlem, New York City. I am unmarried. I like 'Tristan,' goat's milk, short novels, lyric poems, heat, simple folk, boats and bullfights; I dislike 'Aida,' parsnips, long novels, narrative poems, cold, pretentious folk, buses and bridges.

Langston Hughes

#3. Writing is my number one passion. I've written two novels. I've written a screenplay. I also write short stories and poetry.

Evangeline Lilly

#4. My first five novels were written longhand. So were hosts of short stories.

Jane Lindskold

#5. When I was one day old, I learned how to read. When I was two days old, I started to write. By the time I was three, I had finished 212 short stories, 38 novels, 730 poems, and one very funny limerick, all before breakfast.

Jon Scieszka

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. I imagine I should have told it to you before? I love you, Sejal.I wish for you to become my wife.Recently I've also opened a shop in North Dakota and thinking that, just maybe, you love me too.

Chayada Welljaipet

#9. 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

#10. 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

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

Jennifer Weiner

#12. I'm going to marry my novels and have little short stories for children.

Jack Kerouac

#13. Many of my better short stories are just the last chapters of novels I did not write.

Roger Zelazny

#14. 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

#15. Poetry, fiction as novels or short stories - these are autonomous as created by their authors. They should stand on their own, like pieces of furniture that should be judged as to their usefulness, elegance.

F. Sionil Jose

#16. 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

#17. New thing is made in writting books, (novels, short stories... stories...)... It's to be build a character which you will love you will like him.... and one moment he dies... isn't it awesome?

Deyth Banger

#18. The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.

Anthony Burgess

#19. Will Cato's alien buddies come en masse and invade Earth? He's not sure but he'll try to keep humanity in the loop.

John Hopkins

#20. Lost Cactus is a cornucopia of sights, sounds and inhabitants completely foreign to a little squirrel like Sammy, but attempting to set him straight will only complicate matters.

John Hopkins

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

Elizabeth McCracken

#22. Well, to be honest I think I'm a better short story writer than a novelist. Novels I find very hard, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, of conscious thought - whereas short stories slip out painlessly in a few days.

Eric Brown

#23. The reason I shift gears constantly, why I'm doing an opera, why I've done essays, why I've written poetry for years that nobody wanted, why I do short stories and novels and screenplays ... is so I will have new ways of failing. This means becoming a student again.

Ray Bradbury

#24. One word after another. That's the only way that novels get written and, short of elves coming in the night and turning your jumbled notes into Chapter Nine, it's the only way to do it. So keep on keeping on. Write another word and then another.

Neil Gaiman

#25. Curiously, there are many perfect short stories, but no perfect novels.

J.G. Ballard

#26. Experiments with the "as if" of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels.

Ben Lerner

#27. We like to look out on the world and see ourselves, so we have many, many novels, memoirs, and short stories in Iraq that are largely about Americans in Iraq, doing what Americans do.

Elliott Colla

#28. I prefer short stories, but publishers would, of course, rather that writers produce novels, since novels are still more commercially viable.

Charles Baxter

#29. I've made seventeen or eighteen films now, only two of which have been original screenplays, all the others have been based on short stories or novels, and I find the long short story ideal for adaptation.

Satyajit Ray

#30. ...and lovers of romance novels and dissident rebels and brothers in Christ and druids and shamans and aphrodisiac vendors and scriveners and purveyors of real fake passports and gun-runners and porters and bric-a-brac trades and mining prospectors short on liquid assets and Siamese twins...

Fiston Mwanza Mujila

#31. It got to the point where most of my time went toward writing novels. I would still occasionally write short stories, but only when I was commissioned by an editor to write for a themed anthology or special issue.

Tim Pratt

#32. Short stories are often treated as the poor cousins of novels.

Christopher Bram

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. I'm very interested in writing - it just takes so much discipline, whether it's short stories or novels.

Conor Oberst

#36. Bentley is a good bee with a shaky sense of direction and an appetite for mayhem. Just don't call him a drone. He hates that.

John Hopkins

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. My life is in these books. Read these and know my heart. We are not quire novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works.

Gabrielle Zevin

#40. 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

#41. Novels have much more space than short stories, which gives you more leeway with the number of characters you can include. Even 'furniture' characters can be described and given speaking parts to develop background or atmosphere.

Nancy Kress

#42. I'd love to see more novels and short stories where the characters have their own folklore that isn't the Plot-Bearing Prophecy of Doom.

Marie Brennan

#43. Every new medium has, within a short time of its introduction, been condemned as a threat to young people. Pulp novels would destroy their morals, TV would wreck their eyesight, video games would make them violent.

Hanna Rosin

#44. I come from a prose background. I come from short story background, and that led me into novels.

Greg Rucka

#45. Ty is green but never with envy. Best of all, he's usually available to help move a heavy piece of furniture.

John Hopkins

#46. 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

#47. Even when she was alive, Esther Kreitman's novels, short stories and translations received far less attention than the work of her famous brothers, I. J. and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Clive Sinclair

#48. Thus far, I've devoted my entire career to publishing genre short fiction, but I now look forward to applying that same level of curation to finding the best new novels and new authors.

John Joseph Adams

#49. Novels are my favorite to write and read. I do like writing personal essays, too. I'm not really a short story writer, nor do I tend to gravitate to them as a reader.

Dani Shapiro

#50. I read more than I had in years-novels, short stories, three long nonfiction books about how we had stumbled into the Iraq mess (the short answer appeared to have W for a middle initial and a dick for a Vice President).

Stephen King

#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. Most publishers seem very reluctant to publish short story collections at all; they bring them out in paperback, often disguised as novels.

John Sladek

#53. 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

#54. I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.

Lynn Abbey

#55. 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

#56. There are some short essays that are very grave, and most contemporary novels are lighter than air.

Fran Lebowitz

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. I guess I would say that most of what I've learned about storytelling derives from novels and short stories. I cannot think of a novel or story, or a novelist or story writer, who thinks in terms of three-act structure.

Tom Bissell

#60. 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

#61. I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

Nell Freudenberger

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels ... a Library of Congress worth of awful literature.

Seth Grahame-Smith

#66. I've been asking you to marry me since we met! What more do you want?

Chayada Welljaipet

#67. Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark ... your words come out, and then nothing ... but I don't think that's why I tend to write novels rather than stories.

Alice McDermott

#68. The algorithms in his hard drive scrambled and his coding short-circuited. Like she'd downloaded a virus right into his system, he got feverishly hot.

Kelly Moran

#69. 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

#70. I really do believe some people are naturally novelists and some people are short story writers. For me, when I was in middle school or high school, I started with novels.

M.K. Hobson

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. I actually think that short stories transfer to film much better than novels do.

Robin Hobb

#74. 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

#75. I started trying to be a writer and failed for years. I tried novels, short stories, sitcoms, movies, plays, anything. And then, to support myself, I had millions of jobs on the fringes of show business.

Bruce Eric Kaplan

#76. 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

#77. Not everyone can experience what other people can... That's why movies come out... films and books... and short stories and novels...

Deyth Banger

#78. As well as writing novels and doing short-order journalism, I am also the full-time carer of my husband, who has Alzheimer's. Each day feels like a race that must be run.

Laurie Graham

#79. 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

#80. Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.

Colm Toibin

#81. 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

#82. Lost Cactus is simply an urban myth.

John Hopkins

#83. I had a story-telling mother; she's written novels and short stories. So I feel like maybe I'm staying alive by telling tales.

Ayshay

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

Neil Gaiman

#85. 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

#86. 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

#87. We do seem, as a culture, to fetishize the "sweep." But I know there's room for "big" short, fierce novels, and "big" solid ones.

Meg Wolitzer

#88. Glad to know about all of you who care about books, including or especially poetry. I'm a much published writer/editor of 12 books (medical nonfiction, literary novels, mysteries) and much short work, inc. prize-winning pieces.

Carole Spearin McCauley

#89. Shut your eyes," said Miss Tanner.
"Oh no," said Miranda, "for then I see worse things ...

Katherine Anne Porter

#90. You think you're writing one historical novel and it turns into three, and I'm quite used to a short story turning into a novel - that's happened through my whole career.

Hilary Mantel

#91. Novels certainly have their charms, but the most elegant creation in the prose universe is a short story.

Gabrielle Zevin

#92. 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

#93. I wrote my first two long novels and an anthology of short narratives, when I was a manager of my own jazz bar. There was not enough time to write and I didn't know how to write novels. Therefore, I made written collages of aphorisms and rags.

Haruki Murakami