Top 88 Short Writer Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. We know much of a writer by his style. An open and imperious disposition is shown in short sentences, direct and energetic. A secretive and proud mind is cold and obscure in style. An affectionate and imaginative nature pours out luxuriantly, and blossoms all over with ornament.
Henry Ward Beecher
#4. 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
#5. In a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter.
Annie Proulx
#6. I'm a competent novelist. I'm getting better. But I'm a really good short story writer.
Tim Pratt
#7. There are two kinds of characters in all fiction, the born and the synthetic. If the writer has to ask himself questions - is he tall, is he short? - he had better quit.
Rex Stout
#8. 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
#9. Chekhov - shall I be blunt? - is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.
George Saunders
#10. 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.
#11. I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
John Updike
#12. 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
#13. A writer is first of all a reader. It is from reading that I derive the standards by which I measure my own work and according to which I fall lamentably short.
Susan Sontag
#14. If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?
Jennifer Weiner
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. I consider myself a writer. I don't favour any type of writing. I sometimes wish short stories came more easily to me.
James Lasdun
#18. From my earliest years I had always wanted to be a writer. It was not that I had any particular message for humanity. I am still plugging away and not the ghost of one so far, so it begins to look as though, unless I suddenly hit mid-season form in my eighties, humanity will remain a message short.
P.G. Wodehouse
#19. In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially.
Ray Bradbury
#20. 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
#21. I think Juan stopped short - he got halfway to the destination and got off the train. He is certainly an excellent writer and a good person, but I'm not a nationalist.
Clarence Thomas
#22. I'm not the first person to have said this - no writer ever feels that the execution of a book lives up to the idea for that book. The execution always falls short.
Stephen King
#23. My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever.
Irwin Shaw
#25. Whatever you may have heard, self-publishing is not a short cut to anything. Except maybe insanity. Self-publishing, like every other kind of publishing, is hard work. You don't wake up one morning good at it. You have to work for that.
Zoe Winters
#26. I always think it's just best to just make stuff and to carry on making stuff, even if it's not off your own back, because that's the only way ... especially as a comedy writer, I make short films and then show them to live audience, so if they're laughing you know you're doing something right.
Alice Lowe
#27. I think of myself as a writer who photographs. Images, for me, can be considered poems, short stories or essays. And I've always thought the best place for my photographs was inside books of my own creation.
Sam Abell
#28. 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
#29. Really the writer doesn't want success ... He knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall - Kilroy was here - that somebody a hundred, or a thousand years later will see.
William Faulkner
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. I wanted to be a writer, but at the time, I spent my days working a retail job, my nights sleeping in my childhood bedroom, and while I had written short stories here and there, I didn't know how to write good fiction anymore than I knew how to perform good brain surgery.
Anthony Marra
#33. If you're a freelance writer and aren't used to being ignored, neglected, and generally given short shrift, you must not have been in the business very long.
Poppy Z. Brite
#34. 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
#35. For a writer, life is always too short to write. I will just try my best during what remains of my life.
Yu Cao
#36. Tom Kealey might be my favorite short story writer and this astonishing collection is long overdue.
Stephen Elliott
#37. 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
#38. One rule of the road not directly stated elsewhere in this book: 'The editor is always right.' The corollary is that no writer will take all of his or her editor's advice; for all have sinned and fallen short of editorial perfection.
Stephen King
#39. I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.
Amy Bloom
#40. I love contemporary North American fiction and short fiction. My favorite writer is Jonathan Franzen, and my favorite writers of short fiction are George Saunders and Alice Munro.
Emily Perkins
#41. When people ask, "Is there any advice you'd give a young writer?," I say write short stories. They afford lots of failure. Pastiche is a great way to start.
Ian McEwan
#42. Obviously not a Stephen King level writer, but I'd written short stories and short fiction, from the time I was 12.
Mick Garris
#43. (On her son) I've met writer's block. He is short, diapered and keeps unplugging my laptop. Good news: he can be conquered with a bottle and a nap.
Cyrese Covelli
#44. 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
#45. Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.
Nell Freudenberger
#46. Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them.
Anne Lamott
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. I never leave the writer behind, because you rewrite the movie in post, or at least I do. I always do, and I feel like anybody who doesn't at least explore that possibility is short-changing themselves. Editing is the most fun and most exciting part of the process.
Steven Soderbergh
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. It is my conviction that the personality of the writer has nothing to do with the literate product of his mind. And publicity in this case embarrasses me because I am acutely conscious of how far short the book falls of the artistry I am struggling to achieve. It's like being caught half-dressed.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Life being so short, and the possible books to write so many, it's good to function by night as well as by day; but would anybody become a writer if they realised at the outset what the working hours were?
Hilary Mantel
#58. I began writing early - very, very early ... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.
Wole Soyinka
#59. Life's like a book: What matters is the hook.
Be it short or long, just live it strong.
Whether it's five stars, or how near or far, just soar!
Ana Claudia Antunes
#60. 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
#61. An ad for cigars appears in 100,000 newspapers; sales of that brand increase by 3% for a short time thereafter. A new play receives a viciously negative review in a theatrical journal that prints 500 copies; the playwright shoots himself. Who's the better writer?
Jason Lutes
#62. 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
#63. I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.
Anne Fadiman
#64. 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
#65. A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.
Lynn Abbey
#66. Sometimes ... the short short appears to rest on nothing more than a fragile anecdote which the writer has managed to drape with a quantity of suggestion. A single incident, a mere anecdote - these form the spine of the short short.
Irving Howe
#67. I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn't think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.
Paul Auster
#68. 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
#69. As a writer, I marinate, speculate, and hibernate.
Trisha Sugarek
#70. 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
#71. I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story.
Eric Brown
#72. 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
#73. Felicia's Journey by the Irish short-story writer and novelist William Trevor.
Will Schwalbe
#74. I was also a good writer, by the way. My, you know, my English teacher and writing teacher loved my writing. You know, I wrote short stories and things like that. And they liked them very much.
Robert Barry
#75. I believe that there is much less difference between the author and his works than is currently supposed; it is usually in the physical appearance of the writer,
his manners, his mien, his exterior,
that he falls short of the ideal a reasonable man forms of him
rarely in his mind.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#76. Is the biographer an artist who can and should exist on equal terms with the dramatist, fiction writer and poet? The short and robust answer is, 'Certainly not.'
Tom Paulin
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. To dive in the darkness, I should dive in the truth, then in images of the world..., then facts, then in books, then listening, then in short stories... that's how I write the horror. It's very complicated.
Deyth Banger
#80. Glad to know about all of you who care about books, including or especially poetry. I'm a much published writer/editor of 12 books (medical nonfiction, literary novels, mysteries) and much short work, inc. prize-winning pieces.
Carole Spearin McCauley
#81. 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
#82. Any mystery writer is both magician and moralist ... two species of artist in short supply.
Sue Grafton
#83. Poetry forces a writer to condense and crystallise his thoughts and often represents a short cut to truths unsuspected by the author himself.
Felix Dennis
#85. To the extent that the short story is an art, Sturgeon is the American short-story writer.
Samuel R. Delany
#86. I'm not a writer. I think I can write short stories and poetry, but film writing, brilliant film writing, is a talent - you can't just do it like that.
Samantha Morton
#87. 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
#88. The more original a short-story writer, the odder looking the assortment of things he or she puts together for a story.
Carol Bly
