Short Story Quotes - Page 14

• An editor named Kerrie Hughes wanted me to write a short story that brought my fire-spider Smudge from my goblin books into the present-day world. I came up with libriomancy as a way to make that happen.

  Jim C. Hines

  Book, Writing, Fire

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• If Edgar Allan Poe were alive today, his agent would be constantly slapping him upside the head with tightly rolled copies of his brilliant short stories and novelettes, yelling, 'Full-length novels, you moron! Pay attention! What's the matter with you -- are you shooting heroin or something? Write for the market! No more of this midlength 'Fall of the House of Usher' crap

  Dean Koontz

  Fall, Writing, Yelling

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• The reason I shift gears constantly, why I'm doing an opera, why I've done essays, why I've written poetry for years that nobody wanted, why I do short stories and novels and screenplays... is so I will have new ways of failing. This means becoming a student again.

  Ray Bradbury

  Mean, Years, Gears

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• Others, amounting to four novels and a mess of short stories which I did not think worth preserving, I have done my best to eliminate from the record by refusing all requests for permission to reprint them, and I hope I have done a good job of making them hard to unearth.

  Leslie Charteris

  Jobs, Thinking, Stories

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• I found that I could write two kinds of short stories: I could write very absurd, kind of surrealistic, funny stories; or I could write very dark, realistic - hyper-realistic - stories. I was never happy with that, because I couldn't meld the two.

  Dennis Lehane

  Writing, Dark, Two

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com. August 1999.

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• The novella is at once the most elegant and demanding form: a writer must balance the looseness of a novel with the concision of a short story, a feat that only the bravest and most talented of us can manage. In Brazil, Jesse Lee Kercheval proves, yet again, that she is exactly the right writer for the job. A wild American picaresque, Brazil snaps along briskly, yet feels full-fleshed, and brims with a sly wit and grace.

  Lauren Groff

  Jobs, Grace, Balance

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• I've published several virtually invisible novels and several dozen even more invisible short stories over the years, all of which give me joy - unlike the cumulative experience of seeking publishers for them!

  Scott Bradfield

  Years, Giving, Joy

  "Go Forth (Vol. 15)". Interview with Brandon Hobson, logger.believermag.com. September 10, 2013.

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• I know I'll keep writing poems. That's the constant. I don't know about novels. They're hard. It takes so much concentrated effort. When I'm writing a novel it's pretty much all I can do. I get bored. It takes months. Movies do the same thing. It's all-encompassing. It feels like I'm going to end up writing poems, short stories and screenplays.

  Sherman Alexie

  Writing, Bored, Effort

  Interview with Joelle Fraser, ir.uiowa.edu. 2000.

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• I know it may sound silly, but I think my short stories have a life and identity of their own. They crop up in all sorts of places.

  Morley Callaghan

  Silly, Thinking, Identity

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• Oscar Wilde always makes me smile - with respect and admiration. His short stories prove that it is possible to be both sarcastic, even cynical, but deeply compassionate. Just seeing the cover of one of Wildes books in a bookshop makes me smile.

  Orhan Pamuk

  Sarcastic, Book, Cynical

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• Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories.

  Paul Theroux

  Good Night, Sleep, Player

  Paul Theroux (2006). “The Great Railway Bazaar”, p.9, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The short story, free from the longuers of the novel is also exempt from the novel's conclusiveness--too often forced and false: it may thus more nearly than the novel approach aesthetic and moral truth.

  Edith Wharton

  Stories, May, Moral

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• 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

  Space, Allies, Story Writers

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• Always in the short story there is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society.... As a result there is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not often find in the novel--an intense awareness of human loneliness.

  Frank O'Connor

  Loneliness, Stories, Awareness

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• The novel...creates a bemusing effect. The short story, on the other hand wakes the reader up. Not only that, it answers the primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Art, Hands, Stories

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• The short story ... is the most democratic of all the arts; anyone may tell a story, and if it is an absorbing one someone will listen.

  Hallie Burnett

  Art, Stories, May

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• 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

  Writing, Story Writers, Stories

  Carol Bly (1990). “The passionate, accurate story: making your heart's truth into literature”

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• My favorite author is Anton Chekhov, not so much for the plays but for his short stories, and I think he was really my tutor.

  Gene Wilder

  Thinking, Play, Stories

  "Wilder Asks, 'What Is This Thing Called Love?'". "Talk of the Nation" with Neal Conan, www.npr.org. March 30, 2010.

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• When I was eight years old, I wrote a paragraph-long short story about a goat on my mother's hundred-pound, black-and-white-screen laptop. The story came about largely because I liked the way the word 'goat' looked on the page, but I decided then and there that I wanted to be a writer. That desire never changed.

  Tea Obreht

  Mother, Black And White, Eight

  "Téa Obreht" by Jennifer L. Knox, www.newyorker.com. June 14 & 21, 2010.

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• 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

  Writing, Thinking, Stories

  "Samantha Morton: 'I was abused for a long time and I retaliated'". Interview with Simon Hattenstone, www.theguardian.com. April 24, 2009.

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• Short stories are wonderful and extremely challenging, and the joy of them, because it only takes me three or four months to write, I can take more risks with them. It's just less of your life invested.

  Anthony Doerr

  Writing, Joy, Challenges

  "Off the Page: Anthony Doerr". Live chat, www.washingtonpost.com. October 14, 2004.

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• I do think that short story writing is often a matter of luck.

  Robert Sheckley

  Writing, Thinking, Luck

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• 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

  Time, Past, People

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• Take lots of time for yourself, discovering yourself-pursue not only a profession but other life passions, I always make time to rock climb or hike or write a few short stories. Also, find good people and surround yourself with them. Most importantly, always believe you will, unequivocally.

  Sarah Silverman

  Believe, Passion, Writing

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• READING, n. The general body of what one reads. In our country it consists, as a rule, of Indiana novels, short stories in "dialect" and humor in slang.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Country, Reading, Sphinx

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.176, 谷月社

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