Short Story Quotes

• A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Writing, Insightful, Story Writers

  75 Copy quote

• every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as an experiment, worth making?

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Stories, Experiments, Asks

  Elizabeth Bowen (1959). “Stories”

  5 Copy quote

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• Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams

  Neil Gaiman

  Dream, Other Worlds, Mind

  Neil Gaiman (2008). “M Is for Magic”, HarperCollins

  4 Copy quote

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• A short story is what you see when you look out of the window.

  Mavis Gallant

  Looks, Stories, Window

  16 Copy quote

• A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Character, Stories, Celebration

  5 Copy quote

• The great thing about a short story is that it doesn't have to trawl through someone's whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.

  Emma Donoghue

  Insightful, Stories, Sides

  46 Copy quote

• A short story is a different thing all together - a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger.

  Stephen King

  Writing, Dark, Kissing

  9 Copy quote

• Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Writing, Story Writers, Details

  19 Copy quote

• Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.

  Neil Gaiman

  Dream, Journey, Other Worlds

  Neil Gaiman (2008). “M Is for Magic”, HarperCollins

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• For me, the short story is the depth of a novel, the breadth of a poem, and, as you come to the last few paragraphs, the experience of surprise.

  Amy Bloom

  Depth, Stories, Lasts

  4 Copy quote

• The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout.

  Julio Cortazar

  Winning, Stories, Knockouts

  88 Copy quote

• Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Writing, Long, Insightful

  Letter to Harrison Blake, 16 Nov. 1857 See Pascal 1; Woodrow Wilson 25

  23 Copy quote

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• Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Writing, Keys, Story Writers

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Mind, Machines, Stories

  4 Copy quote

• There is something I keep wanting to say about reading short stories. I am doing it now, because I many never have another occasion. Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.

  Mavis Gallant

  Book, Reading, Waiting

  Mavis Gallant (2016). “The Collected Stories”, p.66, Everyman's Library

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• I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.

  Lynn Abbey

  Writing, Literature, Stories

  84 Copy quote

• In short stories there's more permission to be elliptical. You can have image-logic, or it's almost like a poem in that you can come to a lot of meanings within a short space.

  Karen Russell

  Space, Insightful, Stories

  "Karen Russell on the Persistence of the Novelist". Interview with Brian Gresko, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 31, 2011.

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• The short story is the art form that deals with the individual when there is no longer a society to absorb him, and when he is compelled to exist, as it were, by his own inner light.

  Frank O'Connor

  Art, Light, Stories

  17 Copy quote

• 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

  Stories, World, Want

  9 Copy quote

• I love short stories - reading and writing them. The best short stories distill all the potency of a novel into a small but heady draught. They are perfect reading material for the bus or train or for a lunchtime break. Everything extraneous has been strained off by the author. The best short stories pack the heft of any novel, yet resonate like poetry.

  Ian Rankin

  Short Love, Reading, Writing

  5 Copy quote

• In writing I found a way to make silence and to be silent. The short story has a lot more silence than the novel and that is its success.

  Samantha Hunt

  Writing, Silence, Silent

  Source: therumpus.net

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• 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

  Writing, Insightful, Stories

  Raymond Carver (2015). “Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories”, p.25, Vintage

  102 Copy quote

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• Women want love to be a novel, men a short story.

  Daphne du Maurier

  Women, Judging, Stories

  31 Copy quote

• Some photographs are like a Chekhov short story or a Maupassant story. They're quick things and there's a whole world in them. But one is unconscious of it while shooting.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  Photography, Stories, Shooting

  6 Copy quote

• You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.

  Larry Niven

  Writing, Stories, Story Writers

  14 Copy quote