Short Story Quotes

A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.

I write short stories. I write every day.

I'm not against White writers writing about Blacks as long as they are as objective as say James McPherson writing about an Irish American janitor in his brilliant short story "Gold Coast."

The short story form allows evocation, suggestion, implication. Its potency often lies in what it does not say.

I wrote short stories when I was a teenager, but they weren't any good and I kinda knew it.

Most publishers seem very reluctant to publish short story collections at all; they bring them out in paperback, often disguised as novels.

Unlike the novel, a short story may be, for all purposes, essential.

Sometimes ... it takes me an entire day to write a recipe, to communicate it correctly. It's really like writing a little short story.

The novel [The Kite Runner] came about as an expansion of that original, unpublished short story.

I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read the greatest American short story, which is 'Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,' by Ambrose Bierce.

The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one.

In general, short stories are less read than before, they're less published than before and, not surprisingly, they're less taught than before.

The fact, and the intuition or logic about the fact, are severe coordinates in fiction. In the short story they must cross with hair-line precision.

I love the short story for being round, suggestive, insinuating, microcosmic. The story has both the inconvenience and the fascination of new beginnings.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

When I was a kid, the book that I liked the most was 'Aesop's Fables.' There was a version of it that my father read stories to us kids out of. I liked the idea of the short story format.

Once in 1919, when I was traveling at night by train, I wrote a short story. In the town where the train stopped, I took the story to the publisher of the newspaper who published the story.

Writers need restrictions. If somebody just says, "Hey, do you want to write a novel, or an article, or a movie, or a short story, you get shut down."

Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you're a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

I do think that short story writing is often a matter of luck.

Some writers keep a tighter rein on that than others. For short story collections I'm definitely in the loose-rein camp.

My father thought a novel was a broken short story. There's something to that. Many of my favorite novels are novellas. The authors of brief things must reckon with the precision of language.

In writing I found a way to make silence and to be silent. The short story has a lot more silence than the novel and that is its success.

A short story is like a kiss in the dark.

I had a short story collection come out in 2006, and then I couldn't work on large projects for a long time because I was finishing my doctoral degree.

One of the last courses I taught was on the Russian short story, which I love.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Short story collections are the literary equivalent of canapés, tapas and mezze in the world of gastronomy: Delightful assortments of tasty morsels to whet the reader's appetite.

I’ve been asking you to marry me since we met! What more do you want?

I imagine I should have told it to you before? I love you, Sejal.I wish for you to become my wife.Recently I’ve also opened a shop in North Dakota and thinking that, just maybe, you love me too.

Seed becomes tree, son becomes stranger.

A novel is just a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.

You sit beside the sorcerer, your love, and unzip your ribs. Tucked under your heart is a small oak box, plain and unvarnished. You offer it to the sorcerer. 'I brought this for you.

In some mystical way, Lenny seemed to ennoble work more than anyone I had ever met"Also in "Stories and Scripts:an Anthology

And just as I'm about to lay on the Yi-Wang-Smooth, I see Lay #1 and Lay #3 show up to our table and take the two empty seats nearby. From: "My Worst Valentine's Day.Ever: a Short Story