Short Story Quotes - Page 7

• I wrote my first short story for a competition and won second prize. Another competition came up and I won first prize. The first story was published in a newspaper. The second went out on radio.

  Ian Rankin

  Competition, Radio, Firsts

  "Gothic Scot". Interview with Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. March 17, 2001.

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• Though my short stories are the more readable, my novels do have more to say; and they will, if anyone has the patience for it, repay a rereading.

  R. A. Lafferty

  Rereading, Stories, Novel

  "The Alien Critic" Journal, August 1973.

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• Dialogue that is written in dialect is very tiring to read. If you can do it brilliantly, fine. If other writers read your work and rave about your use of dialect, go for it. But be positive that you do it well, because otherwise it is a lot of work to read short stories or novels that are written in dialect. It makes our necks feel funny.

  Anne Lamott

  Writing, Being Positive, Dialect

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• I should say that, in addition to my tree-love (it was originally called The Tree), it arose from my own pre-occupation with the Lord of the Rings, the knowledge that it would be finished in great detail or not at all, and the fear (near certainty) that it would be 'not at all'. The war had arisen to darken all horizons. But no such analyses are a complete explanation even of a short story.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  War, Tree, Details

  Letter to Caroline Everett, June 24, 1957.

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• Before World War II, I was living a very cloistered existence, as most cartoonists do. The work I was pouring out did not come from any real, personal life experience; this was all the residue of the accumulation of Rafael Sabatini, O. Henry, all the short-story writers that I'd been reading.

  Will Eisner

  Real, War, Reading

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• I love creating individual short stories within chapters, but I want to get better at building consistent narratives from start to finish.

  David Crabb

  Creating, Get Better, Stories

  "'Morrissey's hair, bongs made of apples, MTV's 120 Minutes': Inside this month's hottest new books". Interview with Teddy Wayne, www.salon.com. May 20, 2015.

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• When I was about 13 or 14, I had an English teacher who made a deal with me that I could get out of doing all of the year's regular work if I would write a short story a week and on Friday read it to the class.

  Victor Salva

  Friday, Teacher, Writing

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• A poet can feel free, in my estimation, to write a poem for himself. Or a painter can paint a painting for himself. You can write a short story for yourself. But for me, comedy by its nature is communal. If other people don't get it, I'm not sure why you are doing it.

  Keegan-Michael Key

  Writing, People, Stories

  "EXCLUSIVE: Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele Talk Key & Peele Series Premiere". Interview with B.Alan Orange, movieweb.com. January 31, 2012.

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• I didn’t do anything. I don’t have an explanation, I don’t know why I wanted to write. I did some short stories at that time, but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn’t quit my job to write fiction. I just didn’t want to work anymore

  Don DeLillo

  Jobs, Writing, Fiction

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.78, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• I have a book in the pipeline of short stories. You want to hear an agent scream, say 'I'm thinking about doing a collection of short stories set in the Ozarks.

  Daniel Woodrell

  Book, Thinking, Ozarks

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• Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.

  James McBride

  Biographies, Bills, Stories

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• I write short stories. I write every day.

  Isaiah Mustafa

  Writing, Stories

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Have a short story feature two situations, and then let them solve each other.

  Gene Wolfe

  Writing, Two, Stories

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• I think the few writers who influenced me most in writing short stories are Alice Munro and Grace Paley. They're very different, and I can't do what they do, but reading them gives me hope that I'll learn something from them.

  Nell Freudenberger

  Reading, Writing, Thinking

  "Off the Page: Nell Freudenberger". The WashingtonPost Interview, www.washingtonpost.com. December 12, 2007.

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• I've felt pressure to produce long fiction for as long as I've been writing fiction. There's just an incredible bias in the publishing industry toward novels and away from short stories. They're seen as D.O.A. in the marketplace, which seems nuts to me, given that various collections done smashingly and deservedly well in economic terms.

  Steve Almond

  Writing, Long, Done

  Source: www.popmatters.com

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• It used to be that you would go into a writing program and what you would learn was how to write a short story. You would pick up the magazines and you would be taught from the magazines how to write a short story. Nowadays student writers are learning to write novels because that market is gone, so the ones who are drawn to the form are doing it really for reasons of their own and that's really exciting.

  Lorin Stein

  Writing, Students, Reason

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden. The two processes complement each other, creating a complete landscape that I treasure. The green foliage of the trees casts a pleasant shade over the earth, and the wind rustles the leaves, which are sometimes dyed a brilliant gold. Meanwhile, in the garden, buds appear on the flowers, and colorful petals attract bees and butterflies, reminding us of the subtle transition from one season to the next.

  Haruki Murakami

  Flower, Butterfly, Writing

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• I prefer reading novels. Short stories are too much like daggers. And now that I'm done with my collection I'm more interested in different forms of writing and other kinds of narrative art. I'm working on a screenplay. But when I was working on Eileen, I definitely felt like I was taking a piss. Like, here I am, typing on my computer, writing the "novel." It wasn't that it was insincere, but there was a kind of farcical feeling I had when I was writing.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Art, Reading, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Over the years I have forged intimate familial ties with these characters, who are reflections of a portion of myself. Consequently, even a character who appeared only once in a short story waits now in the wings, concealed by the curtain, for his next appearance on-stage. Not one of them has ever broken free of his familial ties with me and disappeared for ever - at least, not within the confines of my heart.

  Shusaku Endo

  Heart, Character, Reflection

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• My short stories are so character-based and they're also so private. They're like a private world in each story and I'm getting more and more interested in allowing myself to investigate the big picture about this country, and about human beings, and about the planet, and about the solar system, and about the nature of the material world in general. And I felt like I needed to move into a bigger form.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Country, Moving, World

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I often say to my students in workshops that if they are trying to find literary inspiration, they should not go and read novels, because novels are more appropriate for series. Where as they should read short stories - that's the right format for you to be able to actually display the narrative in a film.

  Abbas Kiarostami

  Inspiration, Trying, Students

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last.

  Marisha Pessl

  Sweet, Epic, Greek

  Marisha Pessl (2006). “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, p.84, Penguin

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• I've always loved short stories. Even before I was a writer I was reading short stories - there were certain writers where I just felt like they could do in a short story what so many writers needed a whole novel to do, and that was really inspiring to me. Alice Munro, I felt that way about from an early time. Grace Paley.

  Molly Antopol

  Reading, Grace, Novel

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Raymond Carver had the quote that I loved about how he felt that a short story was the moment right before someone's life was about to fall apart. You can't really do that with a novel, but with a story you're just left hanging.

  Molly Antopol

  Fall, Moments, Novel

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I started a short story but it was so dreary that even my pen threw up.

  Jonathan Carroll

  Stories, Pens, Dreary

  Jonathan Carroll (2012). “Kissing the Beehive”, p.6, Open Road Media

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