Short Story Has Quotes

#1. The London 'Academy' has seen fit recently to scoff at the critics who have been exercising themselves ove rthe so-called art of the Short Story ... But the new Short Story has gained more individuality. It supports the magazines and has invaded the newspapers

Henry Seidel Canby

#2. The basis of almost every argument or conclusion I can make is the axiom that the short story can be anything the author decides it shall be; ... In that infinite flexibility, indeed lies the reason why the short story has never been adequately defined.

H.E. Bates

#3. The short story is an imploding universe. It has all the boil of energy inside it. A novel has shrapnel going all over the place. You can have a mistake in a novel. A short story has to be perfect.

Colum McCann

#4. Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand; a short story is a romance, a relationship; a novel is a marriage-one has to be cunning, devise compromises, and make sacrifices.

Amos Oz

#5. The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story.

Tobias Wolff

#6. 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

#7. Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.

Tobias Wolff

#8. You know," Daddy said, "it's some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it's others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He's going to be into everything!

Flannery O'Connor

#9. The story of a life can be as long or as short as the teller wishes. Whether the life is tragic or enlightened, the classic gravestone inscription marking simply the dates of birth and death has, in its brevity, much to recommend it.

Michel Houellebecq

#10. I never really wanted to be a writer. I know it sounds strange, but I honestly believe that I didn't pick the story; the story has picked me. I've written absolutely no fiction before 'The Immortals of Meluha.' Not even a short story in school - absolutely nothing.

Amish Tripathi

#11. If [a short story author's] very initial sentence tend not to the out bringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step.

Edgar Allan Poe

#12. No one has died from giving a bad presentation. Well, at least one person did, President William Henry Harrison, but he developed pneumonia after giving the longest inaugural address in U.S. history. The easy lesson from his story: keep it short, or you might die.

Scott Berkun

#13. At the end of every short story the reader should feel as if a cloud has been lifted from the face of the moon.

Michael Chabon

#14. We need to cherish Father Sky and honor Mother Earth.Every THING has a purpose. Every ONE has worth. (Short story entitled THE PUZZLE, found in a book, Foxleaf Anthology, collection of works from authors in the Upper Cumberland, TN)

KoKo Nervelli

#15. Mama has such cleverly timed headaches I wonder if she has any at all.

A.E. Moseley

#16. A feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul.

Edgar Allan Poe

#17. In anything you write - in a short story, a poem - there has to be a counter-motion; it can't go all in one direction.

Donald Hall

#18. When I started out in the early 1930s, there were a great many magazines that published short stories. Unfortunately, the short-story market has dwindled to almost nothing.

Irwin Shaw

#19. Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.

Lynn Abbey

#20. (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

#21. I love the short story for being round, suggestive, insinuating, microcosmic. The story has both the inconvenience and the fascination of new beginnings.

Luisa Valenzuela

#22. My whore of a brother has done it again." "Then, as always, orders me to clean up the mess." "I think I hate him." Poseidon to his brother, Zeus.

Yelle Hughes

#23. Many critics, when trying to praise a short-story collection, will say that it has the heft and scope of a good novel. But for me, one of the highest compliments you can pay a novel is to say that it has the rich texture and eloquent detail of a good story collection.

Gary Krist

#24. A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.

Erica Jong

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

Gabrielle Zevin

#26. In short, a premise is any single image, moment, feeling, or belief that has enough power and personal meaning for the author to set her story on fire, and propel it like a rocket for hundreds of pages.

Donald Maass

#27. If a story is only what it seems to be about, then somehow the author has failed.

Edward Gorey

#28. The purpose of a short story is ... that the reader shall come away with the satisfactory feeling that a particular insight into human character has been gained, or that his (or her) knowledge of life has been deepened, or that pity, love or sympathy for a human being is awakened.

Lin Yutang

#29. The short story is not as restrictive as the sonnet, but, of all the literary forms, it is possibly the most single-minded. ... at the end there has to be the literary equivalent of the magician's puff of smoke, an outcome that is both startling and anticipated.

Louis Menand

#30. Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it.

Elizabeth McCracken

#31. I feel myself collapse inside as if the life force has been sucked out of me.

Siobhan Davis

#32. A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.

Rebecca West

#33. Shaw Centre has restaurants on the fourth floor, where the ACS boy can pull chairs out for her. Girls love this because no one else does it for them, especially not those sotong RI boys.

Justin Ker

#34. My love for you has no depth, its boundaries are ever-expanding. My love and my life with you will be a never-ending story. My love with you is never-ending

M. Christina White

#35. A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.

Lynn Abbey