Short Story Quotes - Page 19

• A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.

  Rebecca West

  Real, Fake, Criticism

  Rebecca West (2010). “The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews”, p.161, Open Road Media

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• There are a lot of college writing textbooks that will include essays and short stories, and after reading the story or essay, there will be questions such as "Have YOU Had any experience with a pedophile in YOUR family?" or "When was the last time you saw YOUR mother drunk?" and they're just really good at prompting stories. You answer the question, and sometimes that can spring into a story.

  David Sedaris

  Mother, Spring, Reading

  Reddit AMA, www.reddit.com. October 8, 2014.

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• When I started out in the early 1930s, there were a great many magazines that published short stories. Unfortunately, the short-story market has dwindled to almost nothing.

  Irwin Shaw

  Hair, Stories, Magazines

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• I kept writing short stories and sending out my manuscript, and it kept coming back like a bad penny. It was rejected all over town, quite often in very complimentary terms, but rejected nonetheless. Agents would return it saying that they loved it but didn't think they could sell it, or they would ask if I could change the collection into linked stories.

  Debra Dean

  Writing, Thinking, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I loved short stories, and they were all I wanted to write. I love the compression of them and the exactitude needed to get a whole world into such a small space.

  Debra Dean

  Writing, Space, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Poetry died as a commercial form and then it died as a serious art form. No one serious touches it. It used to be that somebody like F. Scott Fitzgerald could make a high middle-class income from working as a short story writer for the Saturday Evening Post and other outlets. That doesn't happen anymore. It used to be that a legitimate playwright could make a living on Broadway from writing decent plays.

  William Monahan

  Art, Writing, Class

  Source: collider.com

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• I was trained mainly as a short story writer and that's how I started writing, but I've also become very interested in non-fiction, just because I got a couple of magazine jobs when I was really poor and needed the money and it turned out that non-fiction was much more interesting than I thought it was.

  David Foster Wallace

  Jobs, Couple, Writing

  Source: www.nybooks.com

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• Obviously not a Stephen King level writer, but I'd written short stories and short fiction, from the time I was 12.

  Mick Garris

  Kings, Fiction, Stories

  Source: collider.com

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• One night I had a dream and woke up and wrote down the dream. That was my first short story. The dream was a kind of fantasy of me getting revenge on my father.

  Dale Peck

  Dream, Revenge, Father

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.

  Harold Ross

  Writing, Space, Filled In

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• The short story is at an advantage over the novel, and can claim its nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be more concentrated, can be more visionary, and is not weighed down (as the novel is bound to be) by facts, explanation, or analysis. I do not mean to say that the short story is by any means exempt from the laws of narrative: it must observe them, but on its own terms.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Mean, Law, Narrative

  Elizabeth Bowen (1959). “Stories”

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

  Carol Bly

  Together, Story Writers, Stories

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

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• Writers need restrictions. If somebody just says, "Hey, do you want to write a novel, or an article, or a movie, or a short story, you get shut down."

  Mitchell Hurwitz

  Writing, Needs, Stories

  Source: collider.com

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• ... into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see it to be, allows for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, "immortal longings.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Crazy, Humanity, Taste

  Elizabeth Bowen (1959). “Stories”

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• Many people have said to me, "What a pity you had such a big family to raise." "Think of the novels and the short stories and the poems you never had time to write because of that." And I looked at my children and I said, "These are my poems, these are my stories."

  Olga Masters

  Mom, Children, Writing

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• If we're lucky, writer and reader alike, we'll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we'll ponder what we've just written or read; maybe our hearts or intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we'll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, "created of warm blood and nerves" as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life.

  Raymond Carver

  Writing, Heart, Character

  Raymond Carver (2016). “Where I'm Calling From”, p.14, Random House

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• 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

  Writing, Impact, Story Writers

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• Short fiction seems more targeted - hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never forget them. Long fiction feels more like atmosphere: it's a lot smokier and less defined.

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  Hands, Ideas, Long

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• I would also suggest that any aspiring writer begin with short stories. These days, I meet far too many young writers who try to start off with a novel right off, or a trilogy, or even a nine-book series. That's like starting in at rock climbing by tackling Mt. Everest. Short stories help you learn your craft.

  George R. R. Martin

  Book, Rocks, Climbing

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• My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.

  Raymond Carver

  Writing, Responsibility, Stories

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• Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Two, Trout, Purpose

  Kurt Vonnegut (1999). “Breakfast of Champions: Or, Goodbye Blue Monday!”, CNIB, 197

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• That same night, I wrote my first short story. It took me thirty minutes. It was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife's slain body in his arms.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Dark, Night, Men

  Khaled Hosseini (2004). “The Kite Runner”, p.35, Penguin

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• The best advice I can give on this is, once it's done, to put it away until you can read it with new eyes. Finish the short story, print it out, then put it in a drawer and write other things. When you're ready, pick it up and read it, as if you've never read it before. If there are things you aren't satisfied with as a reader, go in and fix them as a writer: that's revision.

  Neil Gaiman

  Writing, Eye, Giving

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• One of my many theories about short stories is that their titles and first lines ought to be memorable, because if not memorable they will not be remembered, and if not remembered the stories will not be reprinted (because no one can find them).

  Damon Knight

  Memorable, Writing, Titles

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• I have written about 240 books and some short stories, too. It's taken me many years.

  Eve Bunting

  Book, Taken, Years

  Source: www.scholastic.com

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