Short Stories With Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Scrivener is where I live. I'm planning the next novel, two screenplays and a couple of short stories with it and it's amazing how fluid the software makes the process. I genuinely think this is the biggest software advance for writers since the word processor.

Michael Marshall Smith

#3. This town of churches and dreams; this town I thought I would lose myself in, with its backward ways and winding roads leading to nowhere; but, I found myself instead. -Magic in the Backyard (excerpt from American Honey)

Kellie Elmore

#4. I like to see you in a sari, with your long hair dressed in a single plait. Don't forget that I married a girl from India because I like my wife to be conservative and feminine.

K. Kanagalatha

#5. I have had, like most women, a lifelong preoccupation with my weight. My first published short story was a love story between an elderly man and a very young morbidity obese woman.

Lori Lansens

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. Start with short stories. After all, if you were taking up rock climbing, you wouldn't start with Mount Everest. So if you're starting fantasy, don't start with a nine-book series.

George R R Martin

#9. I get stage fright with short stories. For me it feels like standup comedy: kill or die. I'm more confident when I begin a novel because I know I have space to fail.

Sefi Atta

#10. Sometimes I try my hand at turning out small profundities and uncertain short stories, but I always end up with just one single word: God.

Etty Hillesum

#11. Generally speaking, all true children's stories make promises to their readers. Here you are, they say, unhandy and short, and there is a big world that one day will be yours. Listen to how it happened for Cinderella once upon a time, and Jack with his beanstalk, and Aladdin with his lamp.

John Goldthwaite

#12. Wafa Wanaka, our elders say. Not only does this mean that death is the ultimate peace, it also means that we are not to speak ill of the dead. Once a person has crossed over to the real of the spirits, he takes his transgressions with him, and we speak only of the good. - 'Something Nice from London

Petina Gappah

#13. 'The Blade Itself' was my first book. Probably I should've tried a few short stories first, but for some reason I decided to begin with Everest.

Joe Abercrombie

#14. I see a correlation between short stories and songs, because of their length and for what they're meant to evoke. Combine certain words with melodies and it all becomes very moving.

Paul Simon

#15. We're living in a tremendously new landscape, and the possibility of what can be created is immense. These tools of the moving image have a relatively short history in art, and what we can do with them is still largely unknown. We are still innovating and finding ways to tell stories.

Doug Aitken

#16. 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

#17. She shuffled with her head bowed, her dark eyes drifting to avoid contact, and she screamed in bed at night. (Dark City Lights)

Jim Fusilli

#18. I never know exactly where I'm going with a story, whether it's a short story or a novel. If I did I'd soon grow bored of it. The fun, for me, is in the finding out and the making sense of it.

Nicholas Royle

#19. Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children.

Helen Dunmore

#20. I've written short stories from male perspectives before, and I've never had a problem with it as long as I've understood the character's emotions and motivations.

Sara Shepard

#21. The many magazines, ranging from pulp to slick, that used to serve as both farm teams for writers and lures to readers, with hundreds of short stories every month, don't exist. Most of the doors for new people have been sealed.

Donald E. Westlake

#22. I am unbelievably nervous.
It is most unlike me.
This girl is really messing with my mojo.

Siobhan Davis

#23. Oh, I love to read more than anything. I always love the 'New Stories From the South' anthologies - I think it's the best short fiction collection anywhere, just filled with treasures.

Lucy Alibar

#24. There's little question that short stories, like poetry, don't get the respect they deserve in the culture - but what can you do? Like Canute, one cannot fight the sea, you have to go with your love, and hope one day, things change.

Junot Diaz

#25. All of my short films are about marriages, and I think that this probably comes from some kind of unconscious fascination with my parents' story and what they went through.

Sarah Polley

#26. 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

#27. It was as if my sould had left my body, floated up to the ceiling, and was watching me destroy my own career with one deliberately assaultive punch. (Dark City Lights)

Peter Hochstein

#28. After I published my first book, my sister, known as Kali Willows, began writing. She fell as in love with it as I did. She has a number of short stories.

Franny Armstrong

#29. I didn't intend to become a short-story writer. I became one because I finished a couple of short stories and realized that's what I wanted to do and could do with children and with all the other things in my life.

Grace Paley

#30. Zachary Jernigan's short stories are in deep conversation with the history of the genre while maintaining a thoroughly modern sensibility. Here's a new writer who has found his voice. Listen to him and enjoy!

James Patrick Kelly

#31. 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

#32. I found that I could write two kinds of short stories: I could write very absurd, kind of surrealistic, funny stories; or I could write very dark, realistic - hyper-realistic - stories. I was never happy with that, because I couldn't meld the two.

Dennis Lehane

#33. Sail the main course in a simple sturdy craft. Keep her well stocked with short stories and long laughs. Go fast enough to get there but slow enough to see. Moderation seems to be the key.

Jimmy Buffett

#34. Rueful, bittersweet, funny, written with tenderness and bite, Merrill Feitell's stories, like so many classic short stories, are made from the plain and painful stuff of this world, and haunted by the possibility, and the impossibility, of a better one.

Michael Chabon

#35. Jesus made everything so simple and we have made it so complicated. He spoke to the people in short sentences and everyday words, illustrating His messages with never-to-be forgotten stories.

Billy Graham

#36. That's why Tennessee Williams was a great writer. Poetically, dramatically, it was fantastic stuff. And with the landscape, the losers in life populating it. His short stories have got rhythm, something musical about them.

Ciaran Hinds

#37. I only like naturalistic stories. I love short, fantastic stories that cast a spell over the reader, that transport you instantly to another place with another set of rules, somewhere imagined by someone else.

Nicholas Royle

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. I watch people sometimes, wonder how they can walk around with the weight of what they know.

Cate Kennedy

#41. I don't know what the definition of a short story is, and I don't even care to answer that question. That's something somebody in academia would think about. I just want to tell a story, and if people listen, and if it stays with you, it's a story.

Sandra Cisneros

#42. All of it conspiring to carry them through those first few minutes and through the front door of the house with a lightness that doesn't allow for anything as potentially heavy as an acknowledged fresh start.

Robin Black

#43. In our minds we can proceed without hesitation to the place we might never go in our own lives. There is an opportunity to taste the forbidden and savor its sweet delights. It is only within our imaginations that we can enter into these situations with no fear and no regret.

K. Kiker

#44. 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

#45. You are in love with my husband. You need some acting lessons to learn to hide it better.

Mary Papas

#46. Short stories amount for the most part to parlour tricks, party favours with built-in snappers, gadgets for including recognition and reversals

Howard Nemerov

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

John Hopkins

#48. I fell in love with her suddenly, deeply, in the most all-consuming way.

Siobhan Davis

#49. 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

#50. As a teenager I wrote to R.A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with letters that were like R.A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones.

Neil Gaiman

#51. The hurts from my last day with my father are healed now, but I want to remember where they were; I want to remember what I escaped for as long as I live.

Veronica Roth

#52. 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

#53. I made several short films with very little dialogue. I'm still not a fan of talking heads. My stories are told with images as much as possible.

Asif Kapadia

#54. I've written over 100 short stories. You could say I'm obsessed with short stories.

Nicholas Royle

#55. 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

#56. Today, Angelina Jolie met with Pope Francis at the Vatican. Long story short: She adopted him.

Conan O'Brien

#57. History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories - triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectally - has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings.

Grace Lee Boggs

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. Songwriters are expanding time rather than compressing time. My short stories tend to be old fashioned, with a beginning, middle and end.

Steve Earle

#64. 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

#65. people who read short stories love endings that make them want to gargle with Drano or nosedive off a skyscraper. But

Benjamin Percy

#66. One day, I decided to be an island. I took off my clothes and walked into the sea, then floated there, bobbing along with the tide, suspended by my inflatable tube and water wings.

Ng Yi-Sheng

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. The function of the Short Story is to be interesting, to convey vivid impressions, an therefore it must, to a degree, work with the evident and superficial thing

Henry Seidel Canby

#71. The train hit her with the sound of a meat-filled hefty bag smacking the pavement, and the effect was much the same, I guess. (Dark City Lights)

Warren Moore

#72. One evening, after a particularly terrible row, the prince smashed his princess over the head with an old wooden clock and she tumbled to the floor, dead.

Brooke Warra

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. David Burnett was the son of Martha Foley, who edited the Best American Short Stories series. She hired me to work with David and her to read stories for the anthology.

Terry Southern

#76. When you want to say something very important, tell it with a short sentence! There is no time for long stories!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#77. The market for short stories is hard to break into, but a magazine editor isn't always looking for big names with which to sell his magazine - they're more willing to try stories by newcomers, if those tales are good.

Eric Brown

#78. The problem with relegating black history to one really short month, the shortest month, is not only are we telling the same stories over and over again - which are amazing, George Washington Carver is incredible, there's nobody like Frederick Douglass - but there are so many.

Karyn Parsons

#79. 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

#80. I write all the time. I do artwork that's part of a diary, and I write short stories to go with them pretty much every day.

Mark Mothersbaugh

#81. 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

#82. It would seem evident, therefore, that the secret of the American short story was the treatment of characteristic American life, with absolute knowledge of its peculiarities and sympathy with its method ...

Bret Harte

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. 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

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. Short stories are wonderful and extremely challenging, and the joy of them, because it only takes me three or four months to write, I can take more risks with them. It's just less of your life invested.

Anthony Doerr

#89. 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

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. A collection of short stories is generally thought to be a horrendous clinker; an enforced courtesy for the elderly writer who wants to display the trophies of his youth, along with his trout flies.

John Cheever

#93. With short stories, the story-teller must have a story to tell, not merely some sweet prose to take out for a walk

Herbert Gold

#94. 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

#95. Faith is a capacity of the spirit. It is like talent: you have to be born with it.

Anton Chekhov

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. 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

#99. 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

#100. 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