Short Story Quotes

(The short story) is a form that has all the power of the novel - some would say more - but none of the self-importance.

Readers tend to devour short stories on a newssheet, but would be disinclined to read them in collections

Most of my short stories are fantasy.

every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as an experiment, worth making?

You know, I once read a short story about how much you could tell about people from their shoes. You could tell where they had been, what they did, whether they were real walkers.

I never know exactly where I'm going with a story, whether it's a short story or a novel. If I did I'd soon grow bored of it. The fun, for me, is in the finding out and the making sense of it.

What the short story needs above all is for one of the big publishers to get an equivalent series up and running and to support it and promote it.

You could omit anything if you knew that the omitted part would strengthen the short story and make people feel something more than they understood

If writing a novel is a year's exile to a foreign country, writing a short story is a weekend spent somewhere exotic. They're much more like vacations, more exciting and different, and you're off.

A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once.

I couldn't sit down and write a novel or a short story - even now - because of my dyslexia. But I learned narration through movies.

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.

I don’t think I would ever want to be a writer of detective stories - but I would like to be a detective and there is a large deal of detection in the short story.

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

Do three things each night before you go to bed: read a poem, read a short story, read an essay.

But I MUST say what I feel and think in some way — it is such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.

Diabetes is passed that way -- over and down, like a knight in chess.

A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see.

I've been many kinds of writers in my career: novelist; tele-playwright; short story writer. As a high-school student, I wrote amateur pieces for fanzines, and I've written for Hollywood.

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

If Francoise Sagan hadn't written a book called A Chateau in Sweden, I would certainly write a short story called A Chateau in Puerto Rico. And I may yet.

A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.

The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.

In Mosca’s experience, a ‘long story’ was always a short story someone did not want to tell.

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.

Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.

A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.

I sat down and wrote a short story in two weeks and submitted it to Marion Zimmer Bradley. And Marion bought "Wound On The Moon" .My first sale and my first pro sale rolled into one.

The short story feels like the most natural length for prose fiction, or certainly for the kind of ideas and situations I like to encounter.

A good short story is a work of art which daunts us in proportion to its brevity.... No inspiration is too noble for it; no amountof hard work is too severe for it.

I've written over 100 short stories. You could say I'm obsessed with short stories.

Having made films, I know very well that the scope of the average 90- to 120-minute movie is about the same narrative heft as a long short story or a novella.

The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.

I would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them.

I've written some short stories about my personal experience, but it's not something you can use everywhere. Every novel, every work of fiction, needs its own food.

I'll take a [Pavel] Chekhov comparison any day! He's of course one of the great masters at the short story form, and has helped define traditional conflict as we understand it.

I used to take my short stories to girls' homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime

I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs.

I think that too often we, film directors, think that a big epic novel and feature film are the same. It's a lie. A feature film is much closer to a short story actually.

The events of life have never fallen into the form of the short story or the form of the poem, or into any other form.Yourown consciousnessisthe only formyouneed.

A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.

What you can do with a short story that you can't do with a novel is punch someone in the gut, in the best of ways.

Sometimes I do work on a longer manuscript in tandem with one or two shorter pieces - whether it's a short story or an essay (though I don't write many of the latter).

Writing a short story is a little like walking into a dark room, finding a light and turning it on. The light is the end of the story.

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.

A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine

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

I'm constantly trying to figure out how to crack that mystery; how to make a novel that has a sense of immediacy of a short story. I try to do that and I'll try it again, but I'll never get it.

I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories - I love the short story.