Short Stories In Quotes

#1. Some people become an integral part of our lives; others are ships that pass in the night. Short stories, in fact. My

Ruskin Bond

#2. Yes, it would nice for this fifty year period, this cradle of all vampire short stories in the English language, to include a vampire tale by Edgar Allan Poe. But the sad answer is that Poe never penned a vampire story.

Andrew Barger

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. Every decade, we get a stunning collection of dynamic, heartbreaking short stories. In the past, those collections came from Barry Hannah, Mark Richard, and Thom Jones.

Chuck Palahniuk

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

Ray Bradbury

#8. I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

Sarah Zettel

#9. [Red Dirt Marijuana] contains most of the great short stories in English that are not by Mr. Hemingway or Mr. O'Hara.

Robert Anton Wilson

#10. When I went to university in Colorado, I was encouraged to write very innovative, experimental things, and some of the short stories in 'Bearded Ladies' are a little bit experimental.

Kate Grenville

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. That is what a motorcycle road trip is supposed to be about, long miles and short stops in obscure places with interesting people and stories to be heard.

Geoff Smith

#15. When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.

Paul Theroux

#16. 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

#17. It was Chase who had obtained the information from the girl's boyfriend during a party in an Irish pub, simply by using his British friendliness and charm.

Stefania Mattana

#18. In the long run, stories are probably no less valuable than money, but in the short run they have their decided

Paul Auster

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. That's enough naughty girl," you say in a mocking tone, "I am going to put you over my knee and spank you for being such a bad wife tonight. It will hurt, but you're going to enjoy it a lot more than you'll admit ...

Felicity Brandon

#22. In short stories there's more permission to be elliptical. You can have image-logic, or it's almost like a poem in that you can come to a lot of meanings within a short space.

Karen Russell

#23. I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.

Anne Fadiman

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. The city was a hive from this height, the people and the yellow cabs moving about in the street below like pre-programmed insects. (Dark City Lights)

David Levien

#27. Fame is an elastic concept, especially in a place like this, where we all know the smell of each other's armpits. - 'The Mupondawana Dancing Champion

Petina Gappah

#28. I'm a product of the 1970s, so I have a short attention span. You know, I grew up on cartoons and half-hour shows. So the stories that I'm interested in grab my attention very quickly, and they have to keep my attention.

Robert Kurson

#29. Maybe the price of forgetting that even in America, even in New York City, when a man back home is talking, you better listen closely.

Brian Koppelman

#30. What I am enjoying about short stories is that almost-tangible moment at the beginning, when there is no idea in my mind what kind of world I am about to enter.

Ann Kingman

#31. The brightest minds in our field have been trying to find a definition of science fiction for these past seventy years. The short answer is, science fiction stories are given as possible, not necessarily here and now, but somewhere, sometime.

Larry Niven

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

Tobias Wolff

#33. 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

#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. Can you write 200 words a day? 100? 50? In six months, 50 words a day is 9,000 words. That's 2-3 short stories. If you did 200 words every day, in three months that's 36,000 words. That's half a short novel.

Holly Black

#36. It was one of those situations I often find myself in while traveling. Something's said by a stranger I've been randomly thrown into contact with, and I want to say, Listen. I'm with you on most of this, but before we continue, I need to know who you voted for in the last election.

David Sedaris

#37. Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.

Nell Freudenberger

#38. Readers tend to devour short stories on a newssheet, but would be disinclined to read them in collections

L.P. Hartley

#39. 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

#40. One of the first lessons that I hope you grasp is that woven into meaningful literature, so tightly that it can't be separated, is a telling lesson, even in stories as short as this one."
"Always?" I ask.
"Always!" she confirms. "Good stories teach!

Camron Wright

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

Stephen Harker

#42. In college I wrote for the university newspaper, and I had several short stories published in small press. I think it's just been a natural progression of where to go with the imagination and not have to grow up.

Gabriel Campisi

#43. 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

#44. Kelly Link's prose is conveyed in details so startling and fine that you work up a sweat just waiting for the next sentence to land. This is why we read, crave, need, can't live without short stories.

Tea Obreht

#45. 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

#46. Oscar Wilde always makes me smile - with respect and admiration. His short stories prove that it is possible to be both sarcastic, even cynical, but deeply compassionate. Just seeing the cover of one of Wilde's books in a bookshop makes me smile.

Orhan Pamuk

#47. Everyone has fantasies and the variations in these visions of passion vary widely. It is a natural experience that occurs in every human being. Having a rich fantasy life is not only enjoyable, but psychologically "normal.

K. Kiker

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. Oh, yeah. He's dead, a voice inside her head confirmed.
"No way!" Brianna backed away from him, looking around the room in panic.
Yeah, you're right. That lack of pulse probably means something else.

Natasha Larry

#52. Written by the ancient Chinese philosopher of the same name, the 'Zhuangzi' is one long perplexing puzzle of a rambling collection of enigmatic short stories. It's a strange feeling to laugh at a joke written by someone in the 4th century B.C.

Patrick Stump

#53. 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

#54. Just like life, it was over much too soon. And just like life, there weren't any answers. But like that one-in-an-eight-million great New York moment, I didn't need one. (Dark City Lights)

Peter Carlaftes

#55. 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

#56. Our lives would have been a hell-of-a-lot better, had we known how to survive with what we have in excess.

Anu Lal

#57. Travel stories teach geography; insect stories lead the child into natural science; and so on. The teacher, in short, can use reading to introduce her pupils to the most varied subjects; and the moment they have been thus started, they can go on to any limit guided by the single passion for reading.

Maria Montessori

#58. 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

#59. I like the eclipses, the synaptic jumps of short stories. The reader has to participate very actively in the experience.

Deborah Eisenberg

#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 work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.

P.J. Harvey

#62. Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.

W. H. Auden

#63. 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

#64. A short story is a short prose narrative, requiring from a half hour, to one or two hours in its perusal ... having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out ...

Edgar Allan Poe

#65. 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

#66. In high school, she'd been the loner fat girl and I'd been the asshole jock. There had always been something between us; we had gotten on so easily. I remember being both confused and upset that when I'd finally experienced that thing everyone called chemistry, it had been with her of all people.

Rose Fall

#67. In my short stories there's a lot of focus on people successfully and not successfully responding to some sorts of discomforts or instabilities.

Leni Zumas

#68. Everything Sholom Aleichem talks about in his plays and his short stories is about people, family, man's relationship with his God, the breaking down of tradition.

Norman Jewison

#69. 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

#70. I like fiction that deals with matters that are of burning importance to us in our private lives. And not all short stories are like that. In general, short stories - and maybe this is a little bit off-topic - but I think short stories have this bad association with, like, waiting rooms.

Lorin Stein

#71. 'Knockemstiff' is a collection of short stories set in the holler of the same name in southern Ohio where I grew up. I tried to link the stories together through the place and some recurring characters.

Donald Ray Pollock

#72. In short stories it is better to say not enough than to say too much, because, because
I don't know why.

Anton Chekhov

#73. That was 1993 grunge in suburbia. This was 2003 hell in Harlem. (Dark City Lights)

Eve Kagan

#74. Originally I wanted somewhere to set my short stories about the sort of people I recognise having grown up with. Carnbeg was staring me in the face all the time, only I had somehow failed to see that. Not seeing the wood for the trees, I suppose.

Ronald Frame

#75. There are myriad kisses in a relationship: desperate ones as involuntary as breathing, stolen ones on crowded trains, ceremonial ones at the front door, routine ones as dispassionate as licking an envelope. It takes two to kiss, but does it take two to hold the memory?

Stephanie Ye

#76. She knew breaking up with Ethan was going to be a full-time job because being in a relationship with him had also been a full-time job.

Richard Finney

#77. Steve Jobs had something like a 90% approval rating from his employees. You hear stories about him being this short-tempered, aggressive person, which he was. But he was in the pursuit of making people around him better, so the product they created would be better.

Ashton Kutcher

#78. 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

#79. To dive in the darkness, I should dive in the truth, then in images of the world..., then facts, then in books, then listening, then in short stories... that's how I write the horror. It's very complicated.

Deyth Banger

#80. 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

#81. I'm looking for something new to believe in that isn't the way people yearn at night in the city.

Constance Renfrow

#82. I wrote short stories for seven years and used to mail them out. You couldn't send them by e-mail. I called them manila boomerangs. I'd seal the self-addressed stamped envelope inside an envelope and I'd mail it off, and it would come back six weeks later with a rejection letter in it.

Jess Walter

#83. 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

#84. The forms of the short, written poem as they have been developed in English over the past few centuries can be usefully seen as compressed, truncated, or fragmented imitations of other verbal forms, especially the play, story, public oration, and personal essay.

Robert Scholes

#85. Some worked in collaboration with each other to produce comics as well as short stories.I was partnered with Anita Roy. We critiqued each other's stories. Hers is a corker: future Masterchef. I chortled. There's not a single dud in Eat the Sky.

Justine Larbalestier

#86. 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

#87. If I'd learned nothing else in my twenty-seven years on this planet, I'd learned that when someone gives you something totally unexpected and undeserved, you don't ask questions.

Jill D. Block

#88. On short stories:
something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.

V.S. Pritchett

#89. Any room in our house at any time in the day was there to read in or to be read to.

Eudora Welty

#90. Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.

Neil Gaiman

#91. 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

#92. [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

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

Tushar Upreti

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. The four of us got back into the car. In an instant, I distinctly heard a "soundless music". It was the melody of friendship, the sound of a perfectly tuned quartet who got together by chance, four hearts playing in harmony.

You Jin

#98. 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

#99. In judging other people's work, particularly short stories, I have noticed how novice writers tell the readers everything about their characters in the first paragraphs, disclose their motives, reveal their recent activities and their future intentions.

Ruth Rendell

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

Ruskin Bond