Top 74 Short Stories On Quotes
#1. Readers tend to devour short stories on a newssheet, but would be disinclined to read them in collections
L.P. Hartley
#2. I had a lot of expectations placed on me because I was already having some success with my short stories. That was not a good situation to be in. That by itself took a long time to overcome.
Jess Row
#3. Davey Boy's Dead was given a new lease on life when doctors transplanted the Dynamite Kidney into his body. That new lease on life came to a sudden and rather hilarious end when the Dynamite Kidney exploded and tore a hole in Davey Boy's side. - The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Zombies
Darrin Mason
#4. Homo Americanus is going to go on speaking and writing the way he always has, no matter what dictionary he owns.
Kurt Vonnegut
#5. Our passing interrupted the road crossing, and the crowd bunched on both sides waited for us to go by as we all waited for the war to go by, thinking we can suspend or postpone living and not knowing that in war the heart grows older than it does in dreams
Dan Davin
#6. I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because he says I'm his ideal.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#7. The rain still drummed on the roof, like fine needles striking the shingles. The family sat silently around the table, each one wrapped in their own thoughts.
It was Matthew's voice that broke the silence, asking, "And what happened after that?"
"After that," said Paul, "came Gettysburg.
Elisabeth Grace Foley
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#13. To be honest the future of The Life of One Kid... won't go very far... but I won't only put books/films.... and so on and so on... and some short stories I am going to put... from my darkness.
Deyth Banger
#14. Plays are wonderfully different than short stories, first because it's a story that's on a stage, but there's a different sort of tension that appears on stage - you get to see your characters in a different way - like with lights.
Amy Bloom
#15. How Are We to Live is a collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book's authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside.
Alice Munro
#16. A short story is a messenger from beyond mere thought, that wanders the Earth knocking on doors, praying for a soul that will let it in.
Richard Small
#17. When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.
Joyce Carol Oates
#18. The word "story" is short for the word "history." They both have the same root and fundamentally mean the same thing. A story is a narrative on an event or series of events, just like history.
James M. Kouzes
#19. He had to die someday too. He might do it on sheets with a six-hundred-plus thread count, but he'd die just the same. Death wouldn't forget about him.
John Howard Matthews
#20. For me, being a writer was never a choice. I was born one. All through my childhood I wrote short stories and stuffed them in drawers. I wrote on everything. I didn't do my homework so I could write.
Laura Hillenbrand
#21. Quote from "FUTURE GONE":
" ... I set the house on fire. It's dark outside. The fire tears down the darkness. I turn my back to the place and leave, not knowing where.
And suddenly I understand ...
All dreams are dead now".
Alexandar Tomov
#22. Jesus was short on sermons, long on conversations; short on answers, long on questions; short on abstraction and propositions, long on stories and parables; short on telling you what to think, long on challenging you to think for yourself.
Brian D. McLaren
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.
Harold Ross
#27. She looked at me like I was stupid, the same look the girls in JC used to give me when I hadn't heard of the latest boy band, or turned up at Zouk wearing unfashionable clothes.
Jeremy Tiang
#28. 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
#30. 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
#31. I been starin' at the back a Jimmy Nelson's head for four grades now and I been noticin' how his blond hair curls against the skin on his neck and the birthmark shaped like a half-moon I wanna press my fingernail into.
Brooke Warra
#32. You can't change a single word. What is tensile strength? It is that all the components are working together. I repeat: You can't change a single word. The best short stories are built on this premise.
Norman Mailer
#33. I have spend a lot of time on everything and what's impresses me about people I have written that in short stories as for the whole story, probably it should be here.
Deyth Banger
#34. Some writers keep a tighter rein on that than others. For short story collections I'm definitely in the loose-rein camp.
Roy Kesey
#35. No one is on this road, she thought. No one but us. Everyone knows this isn't the place to be at three o'clock on a summer afternoon. Everyone but us.
V.S. Kemanis
#36. Are you on crack? Or did I take a righteous bong hit before coming here?
Natasha Larry
#37. A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters
Julio Cortazar
#38. She had a new secret, the strenght of the moon, looking at her
Susan Engberg
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. See Amazon's bio on don loedding and a review of his first book of short stories"The Search For the Bearded Clam" and read inside "Global Warming:The Iceman Cometh".
Donald R. Loedding
#43. I'm following hot on her heels, smarting from her latest rebuttal, and I can't contain my temper as the flood of rejection washes over me, tossing me precariously close to the edge.
Siobhan Davis
#44. 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
#45. You need to take some acting classes to learn to hide your huge crush on my husband better
Mary Papas
#46. I am also working on a couple of short stories for anthologies. This is new to me and I'm enjoying it.
Judith Guest
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. I imagine that she flushes, seeing him there, for she is at that age when even the most commonplace boys take on a sense of mystery. And this boy is not ordinary. He is wild and he has strange and fanciful perceptions. [p. 153]
Kim Edwards
#50. Kevin Hart. He's the man! I like his style. He's short, so I can relate. All the stories he tells are real. I respect that, and he's just a really funny dude - great comedy instincts. To do stand-up on a stage for an hour and tell stories and make people laugh is incredible.
Cameron Boyce
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Robert Louis Stevenson ... I'm focusing on the late short stories that I was ignorant of. I always thought he was a boys' author, but he's not at all.
Jane Birkin
#55. Well, Bradbury's a genius. Fahrenheit 451 is one of my favorite books of all time, and The Illustrated Man as a collection of short stories ranks up there. When you read it you realize how influential it is on so many other stories and people.
Zack Snyder
#56. Children can't help but create: they need to put their mind on the page, they want to paint, to sculpt, to write short stories.
Jonah Lehrer
#57. On short stories:
something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.
V.S. Pritchett
#58. He's a hot bath, a short breath, 5 days of summer pressed into 5 fingers writing stories on my body.
Tahereh Mafi
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. He's a hot bath, a short breath, five days of summer pressed into five fingers writing stories on my body.
Tahereh Mafi
#62. Many years later, Sophia will think of this night, and how close she was to tears. She will wonder how she could have allowed herself to arrive there, but also feel a twinge of loss for the girl still capable of losing control.
Jeremy Tiang
#63. 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
#64. Fuck your honour, Kaisheen. You are the smartest man I know, yet you had me travel three days during winter to have my counsel. Are you making a move on the Emperor? If you are, you'll have my full support and the backing of the Monasteries.
Paul W.S. Bowler
#65. But I want to assure you, if it's your last day on earth, even after 2,000 years, I strongly suggest you go for the Versace leaf halter dress.
Richard Finney
#66. I'm only a novelist on occasion. Many of my books are made up of brief texts collected together, short stories, or else they are books that have an overall structure but are composed of various texts.
Italo Calvino
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.
Edith Wharton
#72. 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
#73. A year earlier my parents had moved us out of the city to a split-level on Long Island, their idea of the American dream, which meant it as now an hour-and-a-half commute via the 7:06 Hicksville to Penn Station every morning. (Dark City Lights)
Jonathan Santlofer
#74. 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
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