Words matter. These are the best Short Story Quotes from famous people such as Tobias Wolff, Andrew Vachss, Alice Munro, Neil Gaiman, Antonya Nelson, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
One of the last courses I taught was on the Russian short story, which I love.
Courier 12 is the Type-O blood of fonts – works just as good for a ‘N.Y. Times’ op-ed as a screenplay or a short story.
I want the reader to feel something is astonishing – not the ‘what happens’ but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.
Every now and then I’ll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn’t have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.
I often think of the novel as a form that celebrates social groups, and the short story being a form that is capable of celebrating an individual or a sort of insular little pair of people.
I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story.
You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
The short story is kind of a precision tool. It allows me a certain type of freedom to go in and out of the American landscape, without having to commit myself to a full-length novel. I find a lot of novels out there very boring.
I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story.
I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, ‘And now… My Novel!,’ which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph.
Originally, ‘The Windup Girl’ started as a short story – a very gnarly, complicated short story set in Bangkok that didn’t work very well.
From my anger, frustration, and hurt, I wrote the short story that would later become ‘The Hate U Give.’
The short story, it’s not a step on the way to becoming a novelist.
They were a very good form for me – the way a short story has to be designed in order to function, to get in everything it needs to – and they tend to be absolutely chock-a-block full of mechanisms and tricks that writers use to do the things they need to and have the effects they need to have.
Certain of Poe’s tales possess an almost absolute perfection of artistic form which makes them veritable beacon-lights in the province of the short story.
There are fewer established rules in the way you tell a story for commercials than in features. It’s a great little short story you get to play with.
In some respects, big ideas can be a bit too big for a short story – especially if you’ve only got a couple of thousand words to play with, and you need room for other stuff, like character, description.
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 Story Of A Marriage’ was initially a short story I wrote, and before that, it was a family story. It was a story that a relative of mine told me about herself in the ’50s, and it was a story that no one else in my family believes, and it might not be true.
To me, art and storytelling serve primal, spiritual functions in my daily life. Whether I’m telling a bedtime story to my kids or trying to mount a movie or write a short story or a novel, I take it very seriously.
My favorite writer is Alice Munro. It’s simply amazing how well she captures entire lifetimes in a single short story.
I think I got spoiled and that writing a short story and getting it published, or writing a novel and getting it published, you pretty much get to do the first, second and third draft yourself without a whole lot of interference.
Stories of all lengths and depths come from different parts of the cave. For a novel, you must lay in mental, physical and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame like the lighting of a blow lamp on a building site full of dry tinder.
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.
There is a sort of genre of optimistic science fiction that I like, and I don’t think there is enough of. One of my favourites is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, ‘The City and the Stars.’ It’s set in this far future on Earth in this somewhat static society and trying to break out.
The cool thing about reading is that when you read a short story or you read something that takes your mind and expands where your thoughts can go, that’s powerful.
When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.
It’s easy to write a short story and frighten people for five pages, but to work at length, when you do it as in ‘The Turn Of The Screw’ or ‘A Christmas Carol,’ it’s different; you have to build it and build it.
I often think of the novel as a form that celebrates social groups, and the short story being a form that is capable of celebrating an individual or a sort of insular little pair of people.
I can’t stand the short story form, which, after all, is a magazine form.
The great thing about a short story is that it doesn’t have to trawl through someone’s whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.
I teach fiction in my workshops, and some of the readings could be classified as horror. For example, ‘House Taken Over,’ a short story by Julio Cortazar, is a work I regularly teach.
I have always loved short stories. I have been at least as influenced by the short story masters as I have been by novelists.
To me, art and storytelling serve primal, spiritual functions in my daily life. Whether I’m telling a bedtime story to my kids or trying to mount a movie or write a short story or a novel, I take it very seriously.
My first instinct was to cast as close to the short story as possible, but then I realized that I needed actors who could go for it and that they had to function well as a couple in a love story.
I was writing fiction in my 20s but in a pretty undisciplined way – late at night, maybe, after I’d peeled myself from the walls of a nightclub and crawled home along the gutters. But I slowly became more serious and more devout in my work, and I fell seriously in love with the short story form.
When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.
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.
Novels are so much unrulier and more stressful to write. A short story can last two pages and then it’s over, and that’s kind of a relief. I really like balancing the two.
I think it’s a short story writer’s duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story.
You know, it’s sort of common wisdom among New York publishers that short story collections don’t make money.
All of my problems are rather complicated – I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It’s like a personal therapy.
Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark… your words come out, and then nothing… but I don’t think that’s why I tend to write novels rather than stories.
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 reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story.
A short story is the shortest distance between two points; a novel is the scenic route.
As a reporter, going around, you hear stories you can’t prove, which means you can’t put them in the newspaper. But they’re good stories, and I would jot them down thinking maybe one day I could write that as a short story.
In a short story, you can use someone – we’re only going to be with that person for maybe 10 pages, and they can have sort of a one note personality. And in a novel, you need to have arrows pointing more than one direction for that person.
‘Castaways’ was a play on what if a reality show like ‘Survivor’ was unknowingly set on an island inhabited by a sub-human race of creatures? Readers have often asked me to consider turning the short story into a full-length novel. So I did.
Like pretty much every short story writer, I submitted to every market under the sun and hoped for the best. The rejection letters I’ve collected over the years can probably make a book of their own.
I used to write things for friends. There was this girl I had a crush on, and she had a teacher she didn’t like at school. I had a real crush on her, so almost every day I would write her a little short story where she would kill him in a different way.
My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That’s no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.
