Short Story Quotes - Page 2

• A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

  David Sedaris

  Writing, Insightful, Stories

  David Sedaris (2010). “Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules”, p.13, Simon and Schuster

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• I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

  William Faulkner

  Writing, Trying, Novelists

  "William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12". Interview with Jean Stein, www.theparisreview.org. 1956.

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• Short stories consume you faster. They're connected to brevity. With the short story, you are up against mortality. I know how tough they are as a form, but they're also a total joy.

  Ali Smith

  Joy, Insightful, Stories

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• San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.

  William Saroyan

  Art, Block, Home

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• A short story padded. A species of composition bearing the same relation to literature that the panorama bears to art. As it is too long to be read at a sitting the impressions made by its successive parts are successively effaced, as in the pa

  Ambrose Bierce

  Success, Art, Long

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• Somewhere around the place I've got an unfinished short story about Schrodinger's Dog; it was mostly moaning about all the attention the cat was getting.

  Terry Pratchett

  Funny, Dog, Cat

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• Jesus of Nazareth could have chosen simply to express Himself in moral precepts; but like a great poet He chose the form of the parable, wonderful short stories that entertained and clothed the moral precept in an eternal form. It is not sufficient to catch man's mind, you must also catch the imaginative faculties of his mind.

  Dudley Nichols

  Jesus, Men, Mind

  "Film and/as literature". Book by John Harrington, p. 238, 1977.

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• Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.

  Tobias Wolff

  Order, Insightful, Stories

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• One of my standard - and fairly true - responses to the question as to how story ideas come to me is that story ideas only come to me for short stories. With longer fiction, it is a character (or characters) coming to visit, and I am then obliged to collaborate with him/her/it/them in creating the story.

  Roger Zelazny

  Writing, Character, Ideas

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• I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story.

  Annie Proulx

  Hair, Play, Balance

  "Exclusive PJH Interview: At close range with Annie Proulx". Interview with Matthew Testa, planetjh.com. December 7, 2005.

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• I used to write things for friends. There was this girl I had a crush on, and she had a teacher she didn't like at school. I had a real crush on her, so almost every day I would write her a little short story where she would kill him in a different way.

  Stephen Colbert

  Crush, Girl, Teacher

  Interview with Ken P., www.ign.com. August 11, 2003.

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• A collection of short stories is generally thought to be a horrendous clinker; an enforced courtesy for the elderly writer who wants to display the trophies of his youth, along with his trout flies.

  John Cheever

  Elderly, Sea, Fishing

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• My short stories are like soft shadows I have set out in the world, faint footprints I have left. I remember exactly where I set down each and every one of them, and how I felt when I did. Short stories are like guideposts to my heart.

  Haruki Murakami

  Writing, Heart, Shadow

  Haruki Murakami (2011). “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman”, p.9, Random House

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• Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.

  Ray Bradbury

  Writing, Stories, Week

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• These short stories are vast structures existing mostly in the subconscious of our cultural history. They will live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That's because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs. A good short story asks a question that can't be answered in simple terms. And even if we come up with some understanding, years later, while glancing out of a window, the story still has the potential to return, to alter right there in our mind and change everything.

  Walter Mosley

  Dream, Simple, Years

  Walter Mosley, Katrina Kenison (2003). “The Best American Short Stories 2003”, p.15, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed-he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov's story, The Lady with the Dog.

  Graham Greene

  Dog, Book, Writing

  Graham Greene (1973). “Collected Stories”

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• The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, Thinking, Trying

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.102, Macmillan

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• When I started writing short stories, I thought I was writing a novel. I had like 60 or 70 pages. And what I realized was that I don't write inner monologue. I don't want to talk about what somebody is thinking or feeling. I wanted to try to show it in an interesting way. And so what I realized was that I was really writing a screenplay.

  Shane Carruth

  Writing, Thinking, Interesting

  Source: www.indiewire.com

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• Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.

  Lynn Abbey

  Commitment, Writing, Two

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• I want my stories to be something about life that causes people to say, not, oh, isn't that the truth, but to feel some kind of reward from the writing, and that doesn't mean that it has to be a happy ending or anything, but just that everything the story tells moves the reader in such a way that you feel you are a different person when you finish.

  Alice Munro

  Moving, Writing, Mean

  FaceBook post by Alice Munro from Oct 01, 2014

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• You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.

  Zadie Smith

  Real, Insightful, Different

  Zadie Smith (2005). “Martha and Hanwell”, Penguin Hardcover

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• NOVEL, n. A short story padded.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Stories, Literature, Novel

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.151, 谷月社

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• I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph.

  George Saunders

  Writing, Years, Stories

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• A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, 'Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can't forget me, there's still more to write!' Impelled by that voice, I would find myself writing a novel. In this sense, too, my short stories and novels connect inside me in a very natural, organic way.

  Haruki Murakami

  Writing, Sleep, Night

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• Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Writing, Story Writers, Details

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