Story Writer Quotes

#1. A perception is not a story, and no amount of sensitivity can make a story-writer out of you if you just plain don't have a gift for telling a story.

Flannery O'Connor

#2. 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

#3. So it happened at last: I was about to become a thief, a cheap milk-stealer. Here was your lash-in-the-pen genius, your one story-writer: a thief.

John Fante

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

Lynn Abbey

#5. 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

#6. 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

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

Nell Freudenberger

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. The more original a short-story writer, the odder looking the assortment of things he or she puts together for a story.

Carol Bly

#11. 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

#12. To the extent that the short story is an art, Sturgeon is the American short-story writer.

Samuel R. Delany

#13. The future story writer in the child I was must have taken unconscious note and stored it away then: one secret is liable to be revealed in the place of another that is harder to tell, and the substitute secret when nakedly exposed is often the more appalling.

Eudora Welty

#14. Felicia's Journey by the Irish short-story writer and novelist William Trevor.

Will Schwalbe

#15. I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story.

Eric Brown

#16. 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

#17. Hackle may be the best absurdist story writer working today.

Bradley Sands

#18. 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

#19. Chekhov - shall I be blunt? - is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.

George Saunders

#20. 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

#21. I'm a competent novelist. I'm getting better. But I'm a really good short story writer.

Tim Pratt

#22. In a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter.

Annie Proulx

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. I thought I was going to be a horror story writer. My influences were horror writers, like Rich Matheson, Ray Bradbury and Bram Stoker.

Christopher Moore

#26. Tom Kealey might be my favorite short story writer and this astonishing collection is long overdue.

Stephen Elliott

#27. My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever.

Irwin Shaw

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. For the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.

Flannery O'Connor

#31. Every story holds insight into the writer's soul. If the soul can't be found, the writer didn't bleed enough.

M.L. Stephens

#32. There are more people involved in telling a story than the writer.

Cecelia Ahern

#33. Studios, to cut through the clutter, want recognisable titles. But that does not excuse you, as a writer, from having an original story.

Roberto Orci

#34. I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell. The novelist's first novel will generally have sprung from the right cause.

Anthony Trollope

#35. I love nonfiction the most. It's hard to find a good nonfiction story, and that's why I'm not as prolific, I guess, as a lot of people. They're hard to find. I love the nonfiction writer Ben Macintyre. I think he's terrific at the form of telling a story in a cinematic way.

Robert Kurson

#36. As a writer, you must know what promise your story or novel makes. Your reader will know.

Nancy Kress

#37. From a really young age, I was reading like a writer. I was reading for the deep understanding of the literature; not simply to hear the story but to understand how the author got the story on the page.

Jacqueline Woodson

#38. The challenge of the writer is to transform - artistically and imaginatively - a unique personal experience into a universal, meaningful story.

Hillel F. Damron

#39. A writer draws a road map where readers walks with their love, joy, anger, tears, and dismay. Every story, every poem, has different meanings for every reader.

Debasish Mridha

#40. If you're a writer, write. You just keep writing. And if you're a filmmaker, you keep doing what you can to keep telling your stories; you don't stay on the one. Keep moving forward and doing what you can to tell whatever story you can tell, be it via writing, be it via filming it.

Dana Brunetti

#41. You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.

Norman Mailer

#42. To me, the writer's main job is to just make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared - she's right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves. That's the theory, anyway.

George Saunders

#43. It is the writer's job to craft a story so compelling that strangers will pay to hear it.

Seeley James

#44. Because the meaning of a story does not lie on its surface, visible and self-defining, does not mean that meaning does not exist. Indeed, the ambiguity of meaning, its inner private quality, may well be part of the writer's vision.

Joyce Carol Oates

#45. Let your story grow. Let it surprise you, and it will certainly surprise your readers.

M. Kirin

#46. Don't compare your story to a movie or a book because it is written by a script writer and yours by God

Anonymous

#47. I think it's much more natural as a writer to want to tell one story rather than lots of small stories that are half an hour long.

Alice Lowe

#48. Personally, I see little distinction between an artistic mentality and criminality. You couldn't possibly create a compelling story without some wickedness or some fascination with the disgusting. Being good is a hindrance to a writer.

Russell Smith

#49. I think one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a writer is to follow your initial [writing] plan too stringently. A story needs room to grow and evolve.

Patrick Rothfuss

#50. I'm tired of being considered a lesbian writer, tired of being a science-fiction writer, tired of being a thriller writer. I'm a writer. Period. Story matters to me.

Nicola Griffith

#51. With 'Moreau,' it's been particularly confusing because I started out being the writer of the screenplay and then trying to be the director, then being moved from being the director and having to become the dog extra, it makes some kind of sense to suddenly become a character in the story.

Richard Stanley

#52. Stop beating yourself up over all the days you didn't work on your story. Focus on what you can do today.

Sit down, and write.

M. Kirin

#53. My mother was terribly invasive, all in the name of psychiatric honesty. It was a bad thing in some ways, but I do think it had the effect of making me interested in 'the truth' as a writer - more than beauty, more than having a shapely story.

Edmund White

#54. The Journal is not essentially a confession, a story about oneself. It is a Memorial. What does the writer have to remember? Himself, who he is when he is not writing, when he is living his daily life, when he is alive and real, and not dying and without truth.

Maurice Blanchot

#55. I always tell people I write songs, but I'm a writer. It's a difference. I can write songs to music, but I can write a story. I can see ideas spark in me.

Ester Dean

#56. Most people do a good deal of whatever they do motivated by love. For me, few stories are truly complete without it.

Sara Sheridan

#57. I didn't become a good writer until I learned how to rewrite. And I don't just mean fixing spelling and adding a comma. I rewrite each of my books five or six times, and each time I change huge portions of the story.

Louis Sachar

#58. I was a better writer when I was teaching. I was constantly going over the basics and constantly reminding myself, as I reminded my students, what made a good story, a good poem.

Gil Scott-Heron

#59. As a writer, it is my job to tell a story. I don't want to get involved in social commentary; I just want to show issues from a different point of view. I want to show issues from a perspective that may not be highlighted.

Nicola Monaghan

#60. My function as a writer is not story-telling but truth-telling: to make things plain.

Laura Riding

#61. 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

#62. A good writer should draw the reader in by starting in the middle of the story with a hook, then go back and fill in what happened before the hook. Once you have the reader hooked, you can write whatever you want as you slowly reel them in.

Roland Smith

#63. I love 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' but in some ways I think 'The Lake of Dreams' is a stronger book. I was able to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's all you can ever do as a writer. From there on you have no control over it.

Kim Edwards

#64. If a script writer had come up with a story resembling what you have just achieved, even the Hollywood studios would have refused.

Lance Armstrong

#65. Sooner or later every writer evolves his own definition of a story.
Mine is: A reflection of life plus beginning and end (life seems not to have either) and a meaning.

Mary O'Hara

#66. The portal structure is simply a technique: it is neither necessary nor unnecessary, except as the writer and the story make it so. In the case of 'The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant,' it was absolutely necessary to my intentions.

Stephen R. Donaldson

#67. To cut a long story short, I'm a writer.

Carla H. Krueger

#68. 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

#69. Writing fulfils an insatiable drive. Finishing the story satisfies my thirst. But I must keep drinking until the story quenches a buyer.

Ace Antonio Hall

#70. To create a market for your writing you have to be consistent, professional, a continuing writer - not just a one-article or a one-story or a one-book man.

Langston Hughes

#71. Not everyone is meant to be a writer," Shyla said. "I do believe, however, that everyone has a story within them to be written.

Barbara Casey

#72. Certainly, I read a lot and follow the news. But as a writer, I am not interested in a political story. I am searching for the humanity of the characters. I never set out to write a book about an 'issue.'

Cristina Henriquez

#73. I'm just trying to tell a nice story. Whether you're a writer or a producer, all you want to do is tell a good yarn.

Irwin Winkler

#74. I'm sitting in my office trying to squeeze a story from my head. It is that kind of morning when you feel like melting the typewriter into a bar of steel and clubbing yourself to death with it. ("Advance Notice")

Richard Matheson

#75. I seriously doubt I would ever have written the first story had I not been a lawyer. I never dreamed of being a writer. I wrote only after witnessing a trial.

John Grisham

#76. Eroticism bubbles beneath the surface of every vampire story, but Anne Rice is a writer to make the pot boil.

Janet Maslin

#77. Things that only a writer would understand - you're writing a character - you tell that character who she or he is and they stop you and make it clear, they are the ones telling their story. You just have to let them tell it.

Lisa Marbly-Warir

#78. I never intended to be a professional writer; as the story developed, the one thing I had in my hopes was that this would be something tangible to separate me from the nameless, numbered masses.

R.A. Salvatore

#79. You know I'm a writer. I can't tell you everything in the beginning. Then there's no point to the story.

Tiffany Reisz

#80. 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

#81. Writing is not magic. It's a craft, a process, a set of steps. As with any process, things sometimes break down. Even in a good story, the writer runs into problems. So the act of writing always includes problem solving.

Roy Peter Clark

#82. I know that I'm a real writer because sometimes I write a story just because I want to; not because someone's told me to.

Fay Weldon

#83. I became a writer because I got addicted to story. The first storyteller in my life was my father.

Salman Rushdie

#84. People don't remember lessons. They remember stories.

Kamand Kojouri

#85. I think kids abandon stories all the time. They start stories and get frustrated or get a different, better idea. I think that it is more worthwhile to stick with a story and revise it and try to finish it than abandon ship. Revisions, for any writer, are the name of the game.

Gail Carson Levine

#86. The basic rule [of writing] given us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from the writer to the reader, and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, there were no rules.

John Steinbeck

#87. Fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was. My whole effort is to remove that distinction. The writer is the midwife of understanding. It's very important for me to tell politics like a story, to make it real.

Arundhati Roy

#88. A story rises from the springs of creation, from the pure will to be; it tells itself; I takes its own course, finds its own way, its own words; and the writer's job is to be its medium.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#89. 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

#90. I have written, probably, more books for children than any other writer, from story-books to plays, and can claim to know more about interesting children than most.

Enid Blyton

#91. I think I have become a better writer since having children. It improves creativity, particularly because once you have children it makes you realise the story isn't about you.

Louise Doughty

#92. Books should be like magical jewelled boxes. It's the writer's job to tell the story. My job [the artist] is to make you want to pick up the box, and to peer inside.

Thomas Canty

#93. 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

#94. I don't have writer's block, really. I do have times when I can't get the lead, and that is the only part of the story which I have serious trouble with. I don't write a word of the article until I have the lead. It just sets the whole tone - the whole point of view.

Nora Ephron

#95. You are not the writer. You are the story being told from The Writer.

Richard Wisniewski

#96. I am not an analytical writer. Once I flesh out my characters and decide on the elements of my plot, the story unfolds in my head almost as though it was a movie reel.

Susan Carroll

#97. I'm not really a plot writer - I'm more interested in the characters and sort of small events that propel the story forward.

Sara Zarr

#98. I have always credited the writer of the original material above the title: Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Bram Stoker's Dracula, or John Grisham's The Rainmaker. I felt that I didn't have the right to Francis Coppola's anything unless I had written the story and the screenplay.

Francis Ford Coppola

#99. As a writer, I always try as hard as possible to get out of the way of the story, so maybe that's the most important thing my readers should know - I'm all about the story, not about the ego.

Simon Toyne

#100. The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling.

Richard Russo