Short Story Quotes - Page 5

• The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties, and I think it's how you teach yourself to write.

  Jess Walter

  Writing, Thinking, Twenties

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I wrote short stories for seven years and used to mail them out. You couldn't send them by e-mail. I called them manila boomerangs. I'd seal the self-addressed stamped envelope inside an envelope and I'd mail it off, and it would come back six weeks later with a rejection letter in it.

  Jess Walter

  Self, Years, Rejection

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Some worked in collaboration with each other to produce comics as well as short stories.I was partnered with Anita Roy. We critiqued each other's stories. Hers is a corker: future Masterchef. I chortled. There's not a single dud in Eat the Sky.

  Justine Larbalestier

  Sky, Collaboration, Stories

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• I had a lot of expectations placed on me because I was already having some success with my short stories. That was not a good situation to be in. That by itself took a long time to overcome.

  Jess Row

  Long, Expectations, Overcoming

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The resistance to my work, and to my way of writing, has been there from the beginning. The first things I wrote were these short short stories collected in At the Bottom of the River, and at least three of them are one sentence long. They were printed in The New Yorker, over the objections of many of the editors in the fiction department.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, Editors, Rivers

  "Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?". Interview with Lauren K. Alleyne, www.guernicamag.com. June 17, 2013.

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• It is my belief that we as human beings have a need to tell stories - I think it's evolutionary. So you can think of the short story as a literary form, or you can instead think of stories.

  Aleksandar Hemon

  Thinking, Needs, Stories

  "There Is No Real Life". Interview with Brad Fox, www.guernicamag.com. March 15, 2013.

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• I think that writers have natural canvases, and my canvas, even in short stories, often seems to be the scope of a life.

  Lauren Groff

  Thinking, Stories, Canvas

  Interview with Jason Skipper, therumpus.net. August 24, 2012.

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• I love fiction. I like reading short stories. Cupcakes, pop songs, Polaroids, and short stories. They all raise and answer questions in a short space. I like Lorrie Moore. Amy Hempel. Tim O'Brien. Raymond Carver. All the heartbreakers.

  Laurel Nakadate

  Song, Reading, Heart

  Source: therumpus.net

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• We like to look out on the world and see ourselves, so we have many, many novels, memoirs, and short stories in Iraq that are largely about Americans in Iraq, doing what Americans do.

  Elliott Colla

  Iraq, Looks, Stories

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• That so much of our experience, or the stereotype which passes for it should be dealt with by means of the short story is perhaps a symptom not unnoticeable elsewhere in the public domain of an unlovely cynicism about human character.

  Howard Nemerov

  Mean, Character, Stories

  Howard Nemerov (1993). “A Howard Nemerov Reader”, p.186, University of Missouri Press

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• I used to write my own versions of famous tales, such as William Tell or Robin Hood, and illustrate them myself, too. When I entered my teens, I got more into horror and science fiction and wrote a lot of short stories. A literary education complicated things and for many years I wrote nothing but poetry. Then I got back to story-telling.

  Peter Robinson

  Writing, Years, Robins

  Interview with Sarah Kinson, www.theguardian.com. November 19, 2008.

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• We are not quite novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works

  Gabrielle Zevin

  Stories, Ends, Novel

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• I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

  Nell Freudenberger

  Book, Thinking, Stories

  "Off the Page" with Carole Burns, www.washingtonpost.com. December 12, 2007.

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• The basis of almost every argument or conclusion I can make is the axiom that the short story can be anything the author decides it shall be;...In that infinite flexibility, indeed lies the reason why the short story has never been adequately defined.

  H. E. Bates

  Lying, Reason Why, Stories

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• All my writing-life people kept telling me that I should stop writing short stories and start writing novels: my agent, my Israeli publisher, my foreign ones, my bank manager - they all felt and keep feeling that I'm doing something wrong here.

  Etgar Keret

  Writing, People, Feelings

  "Suddenly: An Interview With Etgar Keret". Interview with Courtney Becks, www.raintaxi.com. Summer 2012.

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• [Red Dirt Marijuana] contains most of the great short stories in English that are not by Mr. Hemingway or Mr. O'Hara.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Marijuana, Stories, Red

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• The writing of a novel or short story or poem or whatever should elevate the audience, not drag the writer down to some level beneath herself. And she - the author - should fight always to prevent that dragging down, especially when the only possible benefit of allowing it to happen is monetary.

  Caitlín R. Kiernan

  Writing, Fighting, Stories

  Caitlín R. Kiernan's blog entry (greygirlbeast.livejournal.com), January 10, 2005.

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• My favorite form is the short story. From an aesthetics stand point you really have to pare down to the bone. You can't write a throw-away scene.

  Roger Zelazny

  Writing, Stories, Bones

  "Phlogiston Forty Four: An Interview with Roger Zelazny". Interview by Alex Heatley, Phlogiston Forty Four, 1995.

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• I don't write poetry or short stories. I don't like to write articles usually. I tend to really only want to be focused on writing novels. It's one of the real advantages I've had over the years. I've only been good at one thing. It helps to be limited.

  Markus Zusak

  Real, Writing, Years

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• Hanns Heinz Ewers tells a short story of a boy who was so unnatural of disposition as to take a special delight in people sick with elephantiasis. Our "European intellectuality" finds itself in an identical condition today which, through Jewish pens, worships the Kokoschka, Chagalls and Pechsteins as the leaders of the Art of the future. Features of degeneracy are already apparent, as, for instance, with Schwalbach, who dares representing Jesus as flat footed and bow legged.

  Alfred Rosenberg

  Jesus, Art, Boys

  "The Myth of the Twentieth Century". Book by Alfred Rosenberg, 1930.

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• I was a Teletype operator in the army, so that's where I learned to type. One day, I went downstairs to see if I could still type - I hadn't done it for four or five years after the war. So I typed out a page and I showed it to my wife and she said, "Where did you get this?" I said I wrote it. "You wrote this?" It was something very funny. I went and wrote another page, another couple of pages, and by the time I was finished I had 13 little short stories, humorous short stories.

  Carl Reiner

  Couple, War, Humorous

  "Carl Reiner on writing a children's book, tweeting, and joking around with Mel Brooks". Interview with Katherine Brodsky, tv.avclub.com. June 23, 2015.

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• I write short stories. They may appear big in size, but when you consider it, they're four or five novels in one... In return for picking up one of my books, I'm trying to give them value for their money... the goal of writing any book is to create the illusion that what you are reading is reality and you're part of it.

  James Clavell

  Book, Reading, Writing

  Interview with Don Swaim of CBS Radio, 1986.

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• Short stories that's all it's ever been Don't you worry 'bout the ending Babe, before we begin I have seen the sun That's behind the rain I have felt the joy That's behind the pain.

  Harry Chapin

  Pain, Rain, Worry

  Song: Short Stories, Album: Short Stories

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• Really, the moment you have any idea, the second thought that enters your mind after the original idea is, "What is this? Is it a book, is it a movie, is it a this, is it a that, is it a short story, is it a breakfast cereal?" Really, from that moment, your decision about what kind of thing it is then determines how it develops.

  Douglas Adams

  Book, Cereal, Ideas

  "Douglas Adams" by Keith Phipps, www.avclub.com. January 28, 1998.

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• Short story characters, mine anyway, are usually driven by impulse, not so much by their histories and the choices that they have to make.

  Charles Baxter

  Character, Choices, Stories

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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