Short Story Quotes - Page 11

• 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

  Voice, Stories, Maintaining

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• Even when there's not a joke or a hook, the first line has to be good and snapem to attention. Songs ain't novels. You don't have 30 pages to slowly wrap somebody in. They're more like short stories or poems. If the first line hasn't grabbed them, you won't get to the second line. Once you've developed an audience, you may have some luxury and trust, so you don't have to knock 'em over the head with line one.

  Dan Bern

  Song, Writing, Luxury

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• I am a toggler. I always have three or four projects going, short stories alongside novels and essays. When one project is terrible, there's somewhere else hopeful to look.

  Samantha Hunt

  Hopeful, Terrible, Novel

  Source: therumpus.net

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• If you write a hundred short stories and they're all bad, that doesn't mean you've failed. You fail only if you stop writing.

  Ray Bradbury

  Writing, Mean, Stories

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• 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

  Writing, Editors, Names

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• The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Writing, Novelists, Stories

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• If you do not have an alert and curious interest in character and dramatic situation, if you have no visual imagination and are unable to distinguish between honest emotional reactions and sentimental approaches to life, you will never write a competent short story.

  Edward Joseph Harrington O'Brien

  Writing, Character, Emotional

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• I'll always be making music. I'd like to do it my whole life - although I also love words and want to write short stories. But right now, my songs are kind of my short stories.

  Evan Dando

  Song, Writing, Kind

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I'm writing a novel about the Syrian war. It will be completely different from my short stories. I have to address my feelings directly because I cannot avoid the war. It's something in my soul, in my blood.

  Osama Alomar

  War, Writing, Soul

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I always figure there are novels and short stories, and in those, I'm God. No one tells me what to do. I don't have to lose a page, or cut anything, it's just mine. Then there are other things where you're up against realities.

  Neil Gaiman

  Cutting, Reality, Novel

  Source: www.gq.com

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• In some ways, Valiant Gentlemen grows out of Tales of the New World, my collection of short stories about explorers who lived "great" lives, but whose experience of it was in the same register as all our lives are - we feel the same extent of human emotion regardless of how exceptional our actions are: nothing is more exceptional than one's own life.

  Sabina Murray

  Gentleman, World, Action

  Source: therumpus.net

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• At the end of the day I see myself as a communicator. So any way that I can, any medium, any art form that I can use to communicate the truths of the Lord and scripture and my passion, then I'm going to do it. I don't know, I may do a spoken word piece one day, or I may turnaround and try to write a short story. I don't know, it just depends, but anything artistically that I can use I'll try to do it.

  Tedashii

  Art, Writing, Passion

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• In reggae I have a model of artistic excellence and possibility that is challenging and inspiring. The poem remains a demanding thing - an object to be understood and shaped into my own sense of self, the same is true of the play, the novel, the short story. Yet, for some reason, I approach these existing genres with the kind of confidence that the reggae artist approaches any song floating around out there.

  Kwame Dawes

  Song, Artist, Self

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I'll give you the sole secret of short-story writing, and here it is: Rule 1. Write stories that please yourself. There is no rule 2. The technical points you can get from Bliss Perry. If you can't write a story that pleases yourself, you will never please the public. But in writing the story forget the public.

  O. Henry

  Writing, Giving, Secret

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• I was a lot dumber when I was writing the novel. I felt like worse of a writer because I wrote many of the short stories in one sitting or over maybe three days, and they didn't change that much. There weren't many, many drafts. That made me feel semi-brilliant and part of a magical process. Writing the novel wasn't like that. I would come home every day from my office and say, "Well, I still really like the story, I just wish it was better written." At that point, I didn't realize I was writing a first draft. And the first draft was the hardest part.

  Miranda July

  Home, Writing, Office

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The majority of American writers today have chosen passive non-resistance to things as they are, producing sloughs of poetry about their personal angst and anomie, cascades of short stories and rivers of novels obsessed with the nuances of domestic relationships - suburban hanky-panky - chic boutique shopping mall literary soap opera. When they do speak out on matters of controversy they attack not the evils of our time but fellow writers who may insist on complaining.

  Edward Abbey

  Speaks Out, Shopping, Rivers

  Edward Abbey (1988). “One Life at a Time, Please”, p.172, Macmillan

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• Do three things each night before you go to bed: read a poem, read a short story, read an essay.

  Ray Bradbury

  Night, Bed, Three

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• A short story is like a kiss in the dark.

  Stephen King

  Dark, Kissing, Stories

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• So, short stories have an even harder time, because they tend to get read during the day, between other things. They're interstitial. And yet the content of short stories tends to be very much "nighttime" content.

  Lorin Stein

  Stories, Nighttime, Harder

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The thing I like so much about short stories is that there isn't as much of an investment of time so I'm free to experiment more. If it doesn't work out, I've only lost a week or two of work. If I screw up a novel I've lost at least a year's worth of work. But the nice thing is that those experiments with short stories can be carried over to novels when the experiments do work.

  Charles de Lint

  Nice, Years, Two

  "EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Charles de Lint". Interview with Charles Tan, www.sfsignal.com. September 9, 2010.

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• I see a correlation between short stories and songs, because of their length and for what they're meant to evoke. Combine certain words with melodies and it all becomes very moving.

  Paul Simon

  Song, Moving, Stories

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• Writing a short story is a little like walking into a dark room, finding a light and turning it on. The light is the end of the story.

  Dan Chaon

  Writing, Dark, Light

  "An Interview With Ficton Writer Dan Chaon". Interview with Sara Peyton, www.pw.org. July 19, 2004.

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• Experiments with the "as if" of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels.

  Ben Lerner

  Writing, Criticism, Fiction

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• I'm glad people see some of the stories that way. I see where they're coming from, although none of the stories are specifically intended to arouse. There is a gender divide on the short story "The Girlfriend Game" - women seem to consider it "sexy" but men usually find it uncomfortable.

  Nick Antosca

  Sexy, Girlfriend, Men

  The Believer interview, logger.believermag.com. September 16, 2013.

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• Kelly Link's prose is conveyed in details so startling and fine that you work up a sweat just waiting for the next sentence to land. This is why we read, crave, need, can't live without short stories.

  Tea Obreht

  Land, Sweat, Waiting

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