Short Story Quotes - Page 15

• One of the last courses I taught was on the Russian short story, which I love.

  Tobias Wolff

  Love, Stories, Lasts

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• I pretty much drink a cup of coffee, write in my journal for a while, and then sit at a computer in my office and torture the keys. My one saving grace as a writer is that, if I'm having trouble with the novel I'm writing, I write something else, a poem or a short story. I try to avoid writer's block by always writing something.

  Jess Walter

  Block, Coffee, Writing

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• Robert Louis Stevenson... I'm focusing on the late short stories that I was ignorant of. I always thought he was a boys' author, but he's not at all.

  Jane Birkin

  Boys, Hair, Ignorant

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• You have to be kind of clued into them, they are a world of their own, and most people find them disappointing because the best short stories are not constructed like novels.

  Tobias Wolff

  Writing, People, Best Short

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• Everything Sholom Aleichem talks about in his plays and his short stories is about people, family, man's relationship with his God, the breaking down of tradition.

  Norman Jewison

  Men, Play, People

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• 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

  Art, Writing, School

  FaceBook post by Wole Soyinka from Jan 02, 2015

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• The many magazines, ranging from pulp to slick, that used to serve as both farm teams for writers and lures to readers, with hundreds of short stories every month, don't exist. Most of the doors for new people have been sealed.

  Donald E. Westlake

  Team, Doors, People

  The Book Reporter interview, www.bookreporter.com. April 21, 2000.

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• I mean, first, almost all writers these days teach because they don't make enough money publishing to live on, to support themselves - people like Tobias Wolff, Anne Beattie, Amy Hempel, Stuart Dybek; a lot of short story writers, for one thing.

  Chad Harbach

  Mean, People, Support

  "Universities Gain Power In Literary World". Interview with Audie Cornish, www.npr.org. December 12, 2010.

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

  Nell Freudenberger

  Writing, Character, Long

  "Off the Page: Nell Freudenberger". The Washington Post Live Q&As, www.washingtonpost.com. December 12, 2007.

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• I would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them.

  Dan Chaon

  Stories, Mystery, Built

  "Staying Awake with Dan Chaon". Interview with Clare Stein, www.interviewmagazine.com. February 6, 2012.

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• A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see.

  Dan Chaon

  Stories, World, Kind

  "Staying Awake with Dan Chaon". Interview with Clare Stein, www.interviewmagazine.com. February 6, 2012.

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• I started writing about New York as soon as I arrived. I was 19. I used to write short stories and send them out.

  Candace Bushnell

  New York, Writing, Stories

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• Once in 1919, when I was traveling at night by train, I wrote a short story. In the town where the train stopped, I took the story to the publisher of the newspaper who published the story.

  Mikhail Bulgakov

  Night, Stories, Towns

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• I think I got spoiled and that writing a short story and getting it published, or writing a novel and getting it published, you pretty much get to do the first, second and third draft yourself without a whole lot of interference.

  John Sayles

  Writing, Thinking, Stories

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• Well, as a short-story writer, I don't think there are any weaknesses to the genre itself. I guess I would say that the difficulty of the form is that one must create an entire world in five to 30 pages, as opposed to 300. There is very little room for fat - you must be economical. And you must begin as close to the end as you possibly can.

  ZZ Packer

  Writing, Thinking, Weakness

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• I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

  Tobias Wolff

  Believe, Writing, Different

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• People who rarely read long books, or even short stories, still appreciate the greatest examples of the shortest literary genres. I have long been fascinated by these short genres. They seem to lie just where my heart is, somewhere between literature and philosophy.

  Gary Saul Morson

  Philosophy, Lying, Book

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• A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.

  Walker Percy

  Fiction, Stories, Novel

  Walker Percy (2011). “Signposts in a Strange Land”, p.77, Open Road Media

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• Most publishers seem very reluctant to publish short story collections at all; they bring them out in paperback, often disguised as novels.

  John Thomas Sladek

  Stories, Novel, Collections

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• Dylan Nice's Other Kinds is the most extraordinary short-story-col lection debut I have read in years.
  It is a book to be memorized.

  Gary Lutz

  Nice, Book, Years

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• The writing process for a short story feels more like field geology, where you keep turning the thing over and over, noting its qualities in detail, hammering at it, putting it near flame, pouring different acids on it, and then finally you figure out what it is, or you just give up and mount it on a ring and have an awkward chunky piece of jewelry that seems weirdly dominating but that you for some reason like. I could be wrong about field geology here.

  Rivka Galchen

  Giving Up, Writing, Flames

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• I love YA, and it's been a really good fit for me. But at some point, I would like to try something else: a collection of short stories, or writing about something other than high school. A
  lot has happened to me since I was eighteen.

  Sarah Dessen

  Writing, School, Trying

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• TV has a longer narrative, and TV's more like short stories. So there's less rules with TV; you can make it a little bit different. [With] movies, the medium has more constraints, so it was just about what stories are the most cinematic and the best resolution.

  Tucker Max

  Different, Stories, Littles

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• Songwriters are expanding time rather than compressing time. My short stories tend to be old fashioned, with a beginning, middle and end.

  Steve Earle

  Stories, Beginning Middle And End, Ends

  Interview with Joshua Klein, pitchfork.com. October 8, 2007.

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• Knockemstiff is a collection of short stories set in the holler of the same name in southern Ohio where I grew up. I tried to link the stories together through the place and some recurring characters.

  Donald Ray Pollock

  Character, Ohio, Names

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