Short Story Quotes - Page 20

• I had no intention of replacing Arnold [Schwarzenegger]. There were a few things that made me want to do the movie. They were the script which had a different direction to it, and it was a chance to do a very different Quaid. I didn't read the short story until I went to college.Reading the story had a different effect on me of how I pictured him to be and the tone of the story was different. In the story, he's a bit more of an everyman.

  Len Wiseman

  Reading, College, Different

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• I lack the skill to hold a story line for the length required for a novel or even a short story. I have never had an idea that could withstand a hundred thousand words, or even ten thousand words of rubber meeting the road.

  Henry Rollins

  Skills, Ideas, Stories

  Source: paulsemel.com

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• It's been suggested that most women fail to write significantly because the female mind is viscerotonic, and occupied almost exclusively with the moment-to-moment reality of emotions. If this is true, literature's loss is science fiction's gain, for Out of Bounds, Judith Merril's collection of short stories, is a warm and colorful rendering of the minutiae of the future.

  Alfred Bester

  Writing, Loss, Reality

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• A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.

  Lynn Abbey

  Writing, Intuition, Stories

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• For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

  William H. Gass

  Writing, Character, Stories

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• A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

  Lorrie Moore

  Writing, Stories, Film

  FaceBook post by Lorrie Moore from Jul 23, 2012

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• Keep a diary, but don't just list all the things you did during the day. Pick one incident and write it up as a brief vignette. Give it color, include quotes and dialogue, shape it like a story with a beginning, middle and end—as if it were a short story or an episode in a novel. It's great practice. Do this while figuring out what you want to write a book about. The book may even emerge from within this running diary.

  John Berendt

  Running, Book, Writing

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• The purpose of a short story is ... that the reader shall come away with the satisfactory feeling that a particular insight into human character has been gained, or that his (or her) knowledge of life has been deepened, or that pity, love or sympathy for a human being is awakened.

  Lin Yutang

  Character, Pity Love, Feelings

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• In the short stories - if I can make a very lumpy contrast - in the short stories I feel like the lives of the people have a kind of prior desperation and a prior need and my longing is for the story and their lives to somehow come together, even if not finally or forever, to face something; and it felt like a lot of the time with the essays I was wading into situations where there was an assumption of finality of understanding, and I felt like I could wade into any understood moment and tear it apart and make it fall apart.

  Charles D'Ambrosio

  Fall, People, Forever

  Source: quarterlyconversation.com

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• Really, I think among the many mistakes I've made over my life, one of them was caring so much about the short story.

  Charles D'Ambrosio

  Mistake, Caring, Thinking

  Source: quarterlyconversation.com

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• After I published my first book, my sister, known as Kali Willows, began writing. She fell as in love with it as I did. She has a number of short stories.

  Franny Armstrong

  Book, Writing, Numbers

  Source: romancing-the-book.com

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• I get stage fright with short stories. For me it feels like standup comedy: kill or die. I'm more confident when I begin a novel because I know I have space to fail.

  Sefi Atta

  Space, Stories, Comedy

  Source: www.percontra.net

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• I enjoy writing plays most. I haven't written a radio play in a while and I don't write short stories anymore because the process of submitting them depressed me. I really enjoy revising novels, but drafting them can be a pain.

  Sefi Atta

  Pain, Writing, Play

  Source: geosireads.wordpress.com

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• At this rate, I'd be lucky if I wrote a page a day. Then I knew what the problem was. I needed experience. How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?

  Sylvia Plath

  Girl, Baby, Writing

  sylvia plath (1971). “the bell jar”

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• Writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.

  Jonathan Carroll

  Writing, Long, Stories

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• Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling.

  Julio Cortazar

  Reality, Skills, Stories

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• Ideas come at any moment -- except when you demand them. Most ideas come while I'm physically active, at the gym, with friends, gardening, so I always carry pen and paper. My first draft is always written in longhand. But once the first dozen chapters, more like short stories, are written, then momentum builds until I can't leave the project until it's done.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Ideas, Gardening, Momentum

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• Every day, a piece of music, a short story, or a poem dies because its existence is no longer justified in our time. And things that were once considered immortal have become mortal again, no one knows them anymore. Even though they deserve to survive.

  Elfriede Jelinek

  Stories, Pieces, Justified

  Elfriede Jelinek (2010). “The Piano Teacher”, p.64, Profile Books

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• A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick -- a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart.

  Neil Gaiman

  Couple, Heart, Magic

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• Don't wait for success, but for the respect and interest of those who read you. At the start it could be a classmate, someone who shares your interests. Before sending off the manuscript for a novel to a publishing house, it would be a good idea to try writing short stories, and publishing them in a local magazine.

  Dacia Maraini

  Writing, Publishing House, Ideas

  "A ‘special’ writer. Dacia Maraini in interview". Interview with Vincenza Fanizza, www.threemonkeysonline.com.

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• I'm going to marry my novels and have little short stories for children.

  Jack Kerouac

  Wisdom, Children, Stories

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• If you are working in an office, where do you find the time to write a novel? But you can finish a short story in five pages. Furthermore, a short story is a perfect place to learn the craft

  Ben Okri

  Writing, Perfect, Office

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• I am writing about people who are alive in the city of New York during mid-20th-century America. And these people are like a character in a play or they are figures in a short story or a novel.

  Gay Talese

  New York, Character, Writing

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, themorningnews.org. July 6, 2006.

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• The fabliau, then, is a short story that is a tall story. It combines a burly blurting of dirty words with a reveling in humiliations that are good unclean fun. A popular venture that is keen to paste—épater—everybody (not just the bourgeoisie), it is the art of the single entendre. Highly staged low life, it guffaws at the pious, the prudish, and the priggish. High cockalorum versus high decorum…. The introduction here, like the translator’s note, tells well the story of the comic tales, anonymous for the most part, usually two or three hundred lines long, of which about 160 exist.

  Christopher Ricks

  Art, Fun, Dirty

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• Thus, words being symbols of ideas, we can collect ideas by collecting words. The fellow who said he tried reading the dictionary but couldn't get the hang of the story simply missed the point: namely, that it is a collection of short stories.

  James Webb Young

  Reading, Ideas, Stories

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