Short Story In Quotes

#1. Fiction cannot betray the truth. Though it must try"...As said by Ernest Hemingway in "Blast"...The first short story in "Bullet".

Christopher J. Pumphrey

#2. I wrote my first short story in third grade.

Jennifer McMahon

#3. Oh," He thought, "There is something very wrong with this girl."
James thoughts regarding Kristen in "Top From The Bottom" a short story in Six Ways From Sunday.

Donya Petrock

#4. If you are working in an office, where do you find the time to write a novel? But you can finish a short story in five pages. Furthermore, a short story is a perfect place to learn the craft.

Ben Okri

#5. 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

#6. You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

Ray Bradbury

#7. Once in 1919, when I was traveling at night by train, I wrote a short story. In the town where the train stopped, I took the story to the publisher of the newspaper who published the story.

Mikhail Bulgakov

#8. I can write a short story in six words. For sale: baby shoes, never used

Ernest Hemingway,

#9. 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

#10. The truth is, you have about three paragraphs in a short story, three pages in a novel, to capture that editor's attention enough for her to finish your story.

Nancy Kress

#11. I've never been a believer in fate. I like to think I'm in control, that my life hasn't been plotted out ahead of time. Sometimes all it takes is one wild thought, one brave decision to change everything. This must be one of those times.

Kyle Richardson

#12. I used to write things for friends. There was this girl I had a crush on, and she had a teacher she didn't like at school. I had a real crush on her, so almost every day I would write her a little short story where she would kill him in a different way.

Stephen Colbert

#13. Why ruin my sister's birthday simply because the entire planet was going to hell in a hand basket?

T.C. Boyle

#14. Introductions, that is, belong to the masterpieces and classics of the world, to the great and ancient and accepted things; and I am here introducing a short, small story of my own which appeared in The Evening News about ten months ago.

Arthur Machen

#15. It's easy to write a short story and frighten people for five pages, but to work at length, when you do it as in 'The Turn Of The Screw' or 'A Christmas Carol,' it's different; you have to build it and build it.

Susan Hill

#16. His love with Lucy bled from his heart as he slipped into a dark despair - a melancholy that only she could sever with her chaste voice and tender kisses. Now in an unreachable darkness, a blindness took hold. A blood lust that would drive him mad for five years hence.

Solange Nicole

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

Lynn Abbey

#18. I've been many kinds of writers in my career: novelist; tele-playwright; short story writer. As a high-school student, I wrote amateur pieces for fanzines, and I've written for Hollywood.

George R R Martin

#19. Well, nothing ever ends well for crazy people in small towns.,

Molly D. Campbell

#20. 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

#21. I had never written anything before in my life except maybe in high school when I wrote a short story, and my mother had to put an ending on that.

Nicole Jordan

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. I invited Onyx to be my plus one. Of course she was all in when I added that Grandma A had a massive swimming pool and was within a short driving distance to a two-story bookstore.

K.R. Grace

#25. The story is always in service to the characters, and is only as long or short, or neat or ragged as it needs to be.

Stewart O'Nan

#26. Nothing ever really ends. That's the horrible part of being in the short-story business - you have to be a real expert on ends. Nothing in real life ends. 'Millicent at last understands.' Nobody ever understands.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. The strikes continue ruthlessly. I brace for each blow, numbering it as the heat subsides, and enjoying her tender exploration of my swollen lips in between. The rhythm pulls me through the assault and, all too soon, I acknowledge the tenth strike.

Felicity Brandon

#30. That, too, was in the air itself -- a whisper of apology when the smell of the soil carried. There should be pumpkins in the fields, or sunflowers, or the peppers you saw up north. Instead, it was the smell of old earth that the breezes caught, sometimes a tinge of death. Too hard to forget.

Christian Crews

#31. The American girl isn't ANY girl; she's a remarkable specimen in a remarkable species.

Henry James

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

Nell Freudenberger

#33. When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.

George Saunders

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

L.P. Hartley

#35. It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things - a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring - with immense, even startling power.

Raymond Carver

#36. If, as I suspect, my body survives by uttering itself over and over again, then I have some questions. If [I] am one word, so are my daughters, so are all of us in strings and loops. Each life is one short word slowly uttered.

Louise Erdrich

#37. Well, the whole story is in the book, but the short answer is that I was the first information architect in an organization that was traditionally design-oriented, and I felt I needed a tool to help me gain the trust and support of my colleagues.

Jesse James Garrett

#38. I like working in children's books because it gives rise to such a variety of jobs. One month it may be a picture book, the next a retelling, the next a play, a short story or the start of the next novel.

Geraldine McCaughrean

#39. I loved 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.' I read it later as an adult, but I loved 'We Have Always Lived in a Castle.' And that brings you around to 'The Lottery.' You can't pretend - it's a lottery in which you draw a name and people die. That's a short story, but it's such an incredible short story.

Suzanne Collins

#40. For a week, you carried my short story all folded up in your jeans pocket, said you felt sorry for the main character in it. That main character was me, of course.

Franki Elliot

#41. 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

#42. While there may not be a book in every one of us, there is so often a damned good short story.

Jeffrey Archer

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

Stephen Harker

#44. 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

#45. She's the latest freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She's the self-made girl!
( ... )
Well, to begin with, the self-made girl's a new feature. That, however, you know. In the second place she isn't self-made at all. We all help to make her, we take such an interest in her.

Henry James

#46. The thorns, ruthless in their protection of the beauty they upheld, tore at my skin, bleeding me like a vampire's victim and no doubt loving every moment of it. The vines snaked around my hands and arms trying to cut the circulation of blood.

Alistair Cross

#47. Ashes, ashes." Her whispered words of an old rhyme smashed through the silence as thunder, and in unison, the shadow figures answered.
"We all fall down.

A.F. Stewart

#48. 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

#49. And that's the bottom layer in old boxes: melancholy, an indefinable sense of loss. You dig around and it comes swirling up to the top

John Ajvide Lindqvist

#50. I'm super, it's like my favourite meal and a birthday blowjob from Christina Hendricks in here.

David Louden

#51. In 1970, at the age of 14, I entered a short story contest offering a grand prize of one dollar. I won. This was my first foray into writing fiction. I loved reading and thought that it shouldn't be so hard to write a story.

David Bergen

#52. I know for a fact that - it's just the way our biases work now in the industry of literature, but certainly a short story collection does not receive the same kind of attention as a novel.

Junot Diaz

#53. 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

#54. Corrie said she was glad that what they were doing - what they had just done - appeared not to bother him, in spite of his belief. She said that she herself had never had any time for God, because her father was enough to cope with.

Alice Munro

#55. In Hollywood if you're good looking, tall, have okay teeth and nice skin, the odds of being successful are great. If you're short and fat, it's a different story. But as long as you look like a leading man type, half your job is done already.

John Corbett

#56. 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

#57. The divorce papers remained unopened in the crisp yellow envelope. He had thrown it on his desk without a backward glance. Between his lashes, his dark chocolate eyes burned with fury but there was something else in the depths that she hadn't seen in a long time, passion.

Suzan Battah

#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. Maybe storytelling belongs in audio - a short story is the length of a commute. That can be a sacred spot where you have the ear of the reader without having to compete with other media like games or TV.

Paolo Bacigalupi

#60. I've never written poetry. I'm not a poet, but I think the nearest you get is either the short story or the novella, in that you can't waste a word. There is no hiding place: everything's got to be seen to relate, and the prose counts.

Susan Hill

#61. We were living in Denver, Colorado, and I was teaching high school. I asked the kids to write a short story, so I thought I should write some myself.

Adrian McKinty

#62. At times like these, size really does matter, I point out, at I extend my ginormous umbrella over her in a way that stops any rain droplets from falling on her.
My Best Valentine's Day Ever, A Short Story by Zack Love

Zack Love

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

John Sladek

#64. 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

#65. I don't think I would have written a combat novel if I had just had peacetime military training. I think, in fact, I probably would have remained a poet and just written a short story every now and then.

Joe Haldeman

#66. It was said of him that he had once been for a short time in Bedlam; they had done him the honour to take him for a madman, but had set him free on discovering that he was only a poet. This story was probably not true; we have all to submit to some such legend about us.

Victor Hugo

#67. But as I sat in that bed, the book in my hands, the city outside silent, I had reason to feel as if a hand from some sub-zero hell had reached up and laid itself-oh, very gently-upon my heart.

Ray Russell

#68. 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

#69. [On The Catcher in the Rye] "This Salinger, he's a short story guy. And he knows how to write about kids. This book though, it's too long. Gets kind of monotonous. And he should've cut out a lot about these jerks and all that crumby school. They depress me. - James Stern

The New York Times

#70. The fact, and the intuition or logic about the fact, are severe coordinates in fiction. In the short story they must cross with hair-line precision.

Louise Bogan

#71. Parenthood offers many lessons in patience and sacrifice. But ultimately, it is a lesson in humility. The very best thing about your life is a short stage in someone else's story.

Michael Gerson

#72. 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

#73. I was writing fiction in my 20s but in a pretty undisciplined way - late at night, maybe, after I'd peeled myself from the walls of a nightclub and crawled home along the gutters. But I slowly became more serious and more devout in my work, and I fell seriously in love with the short story form.

Kevin Barry

#74. 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

#75. I'd always intended to make 'Far North' straight after 'The Warrior.' We had the rights to the short story, the script was in development, and I knew where I wanted to shoot it. It just took a long time getting the script together and raising the finance.

Asif Kapadia

#76. 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

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

Gabrielle Zevin

#78. 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

#79. My first instinct was to cast as close to the short story as possible, but then I realized that I needed actors who could go for it and that they had to function well as a couple in a love story.

Ang Lee

#80. So I'm delighted to open up a bit about these particular details, in honor of Valentine's Day (when every balding, chubby, and short actuary wants people - especially the babes out there - to know about his studly past"
From: "My Best Valentine's Day.Ever: a Short Story

Zack Love

#81. I am in love with a pianist, without his piano what is he?

Jai Clare

#82. The man is well inside the train before the dreadful truth occurs to me. He is the man from the newspaper. The rapist. My doppelganger. My mirrored doppelganger.
William Wilson in the short story 'Metro' by Steen Langstrup.

Steen Langstrup

#83. And on my fourth morning in Naples, I woke up alone. There was a note on the table with the breakfast that Cinzia had quietly prepared for me. It read, "It could never be. But that's why it will always be - perfectly divine. Cinzia"
City Solipsism: A Short Story

Zack Love

#84. I wrote my first short story for a competition and won second prize. Another competition came up and I won first prize. The first story was published in a newspaper. The second went out on radio.

Ian Rankin

#85. Regalverborgenheiten" word found in Gabriele Wohmann's short story "Die Feindin" meaning the comforting seclusion of being surrounded by book cases.

Gabriele Wohmann

#86. A sound from upstairs sends my thought process reeling. It's just a small noise, perhaps the sound of your feet brushing the crimson carpet in the bedroom? It's not loud or menacing, but it sends a wave of adrenaline crashing through me. You're on your way!

Felicity Brandon

#87. When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my training in this medium.

Truman Capote

#88. 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

#89. Toraf nods in all seriousness. "Humans eat sand. That's why they spend so much time on land".

Anna Banks

#90. I was cautious in what I said before the young lady; for I could not be sure that she was sane; and, in fact, there was a certain restless brilliancy about her eyes that half led me to imagine she was not.

Edgar Allan Poe

#91. 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

#92. The difference between a short story and a novel is the difference between an inarticulate pang in your heart compared to the tragedy of your whole life.

Peter Orner

#93. The Colt rested in her lap. "You better wake up in the morning, Mr. Latimer because I don't want to have to explain a dead man in my cabin to the sheriff."
- Emma in "Emma of Crooked Creek

MK McClintock

#94. A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine.

Chuck Palahniuk

#95. In a short story, you can use someone - we're only going to be with that person for maybe 10 pages, and they can have sort of a one note personality. And in a novel, you need to have arrows pointing more than one direction for that person.

Rebecca Makkai

#96. They were each like a mirror for the other, reflecting the changes in themselves.

Haruki Murakami

#97. I said: "Dead end - quiet, restful, like your town. I like a town like this." Marlowe (talking about Olympia) in a short story called Goldfish.

Raymond Chandler

#98. A short story padded. A species of composition bearing the same relation to literature that the panorama bears to art. As it is too long to be read at a sitting the impressions made by its successive parts are successively effaced, as in the pa

Ambrose Bierce

#99. I cannot believe I have been duped, not once but twice. My three years gaining a degree in psychology was clearly a waste of time. I might as well have studied Klingon.

Susan Lodge

#100. Pixar's short films convinced Disney that if the company could produce memorable characters within five minutes, then the confidence was there in creating a feature film with those abilities in story and character development.

John Lasseter