Top 39 Short Story Writer Quotes
#1. A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.
Lynn Abbey
#2. The only thing I know anything about are my own fantasies and anxieties. I don't trust my eyes. I consider myself to be a short-story writer.
Duane Michals
#3. 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
#4. My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever.
Irwin Shaw
#5. Tom Kealey might be my favorite short story writer and this astonishing collection is long overdue.
Stephen Elliott
#6. Short stories are designed to deliver their impact in as few pages as possible. A tremendous amount is left out, and a good short story writer learns to include only the most essential information.
Orson Scott Card
#7. I've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he's a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great diarist, a great short story writer, and a great novelist - I'd put novelist last.
John Banville
#8. In a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter.
Annie Proulx
#9. I'm a competent novelist. I'm getting better. But I'm a really good short story writer.
Tim Pratt
#10. The short-story writer knows that he can't proceed cumulatively, that time is not his ally. His only solution is to work vertically, heading up or down in literary space.
Julio Cortazar
#11. Chekhov - shall I be blunt? - is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.
George Saunders
#12. I'm a novelist, editor, short story writer. I also teach, and I freelance sometimes as an arts consultant. Most of my books have been published by Warner Books, now known as Grand Central Books.
Nalo Hopkinson
#13. I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story.
Eric Brown
#14. Well, to be honest I think I'm a better short story writer than a novelist. Novels I find very hard, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, of conscious thought - whereas short stories slip out painlessly in a few days.
Eric Brown
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.
Nell Freudenberger
#19. One of my favorite writers is short story writer/essayist Jorge Luis Borges, who was blind. I'm not claiming to be anything remotely resembling a talent of Borges' caliber, but he is an inspiration and a proof that one can be a meaningful and successful writer while blind.
Larry Howes
#20. The more original a short-story writer, the odder looking the assortment of things he or she puts together for a story.
Carol Bly
#21. Novels are my favorite to write and read. I do like writing personal essays, too. I'm not really a short story writer, nor do I tend to gravitate to them as a reader.
Dani Shapiro
#22. To the extent that the short story is an art, Sturgeon is the American short-story writer.
Samuel R. Delany
#23. Felicia's Journey by the Irish short-story writer and novelist William Trevor.
Will Schwalbe
#24. I've always loved short stories. Even before I was a writer, I was reading short stories - there were certain writers where I just felt like they could do in a short story what so many writers needed a whole novel to do, and that was really inspiring to me.
Molly Antopol
#25. Among the many queer things about the American economy is this: A writer can get more money for a bungling speech at a bankrupt college than he can get for a short-story masterpiece. What's more, he can sell the speech over and over again, and no one complains.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#26. A short story is a writer's way of thinking through experience ... Journalism aims at accuracy, but fiction's aim is truth. The writer distorts reality in the interest of a larger truth.
John L'Heureux
#27. 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
#28. In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially.
Ray Bradbury
#29. While the novel-writer aims at an eminently natural method of transcription, the author of the short story adopts a very artificial one
Henry Seidel Canby
#30. I remember selling my first short story and thinking, Oh my god, I sold something for fifty dollars! That gives me the authority to say I'm a writer and to actually write more things! It legitimized the activity.
Chuck Palahniuk
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.
Nell Freudenberger
#35. I've read science fiction my whole life. I never really dreamed that I'd be a published science fiction writer myself, but a short story I started years ago sort of demanded to be turned into a novel.
Ramez Naam
#36. Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you're a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable.
Neil Gaiman
#37. You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
Zadie Smith
#39. The writing of a novel or short story or poem or whatever should elevate the audience, not drag the writer down to some level beneath herself. And she - the author - should fight always to prevent that dragging down, especially when the only possible benefit of allowing it to happen is monetary.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
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