Top 130 Short Stories Quotes

Short stories and poems are an intense burst of emotions.

When I was one day old, I learned how to read. When I was two days old, I started to write. By the time I was three, I had finished 212 short stories, 38 novels, 730 poems, and one very funny limerick, all before breakfast.

Can you write 200 words a day? 100? 50? In six months, 50 words a day is 9,000 words. That’s 2-3 short stories. If you did 200 words every day, in three months that’s 36,000 words. That’s half a short novel.

I really like the short stories that Melissa Bank writes. I think she’s sort of channeling the female version of J.D. Salinger in more recent days.

Novels have much more space than short stories, which gives you more leeway with the number of characters you can include. Even ‘furniture’ characters can be described and given speaking parts to develop background or atmosphere.

I know it may sound silly, but I think my short stories have a life and identity of their own. They crop up in all sorts of places.

On the other hand, now that I’m not dependent on fiction for my income, I’ve been writing more short stories despite the fact that there’s no real paying market for short horror other than Cemetery Dance.

There’s a joy in writing short stories, a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off.

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.

For me, being a writer was never a choice. I was born one. All through my childhood I wrote short stories and stuffed them in drawers. I wrote on everything. I didn’t do my homework so I could write.

I guess I would say that most of what I’ve learned about storytelling derives from novels and short stories. I cannot think of a novel or story, or a novelist or story writer, who thinks in terms of three-act structure.

I was a good student, but a speech impediment was causing problems. One of my teachers decided that I couldn’t pronounce certain words at all. She thought that if I wrote something, I would use words I could pronounce. I began writing little poems. I began to write short stories, too.

I’ve made seventeen or eighteen films now, only two of which have been original screenplays, all the others have been based on short stories or novels, and I find the long short story ideal for adaptation.

Plays are wonderfully different than short stories, first because it’s a story that’s on a stage, but there’s a different sort of tension that appears on stage – you get to see your characters in a different way – like with lights.

As an actor, there is room for a certain amount of creativity, but you’re always ultimately going to be saying somebody else’s words. I don’t think I’d have the stamina, skill or ability to write a novel, but I’d love to write short stories and poetry, because those are my two passions.

As a teenager I wrote to R.A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with letters that were like R.A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones.

When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.

I feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when writing a novel, and short stories are more about instant gratification.

I love YA, and it’s been a really good fit for me. But at some point, I would like to try something else: a collection of short stories, or writing about something other than high school. A lot has happened to me since I was eighteen.

I studied the short story as part of my creative writing course at university but then set off as a novelist. Generally, there is a sense that even if you want to write short stories, you need to do a novel first.

I would never have thought my collection of short stories would win the Giller.

I think most fiction writers naturally start by writing short stories, but some of us don’t. When I first started writing, I just started writing a novel. It’s a hard way to learn to write. I don’t recommend it to my students, but it just happens that way for some of us.

I started off doing fiction in 1993. It didn’t occur to me to do nonfiction because it wasn’t a thing yet. So I was bumbling around, writing short stories, and then I took a nonfiction workshop, and I realized that this was what I was supposed to do.

No matter how long my day job hours were, I always made time to write. I wrote fiction, short stories, and poetry. I never shared it with anybody.

Most of my short stories are fantasy.

When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.

I’ve written short stories in first person, but you have so much more control writing in third person. Third person, you know what everybody’s thinking. First person is very limiting, and I could never sustain a first person novel before.

You want to hear an agent scream, say, ‘I’m thinking about doing a collection of short stories set in the Ozarks.’

I always wanted to direct and write a movie, but I thought that I didn’t really have it in me. I tried to write fiction and humorous short stories, and some were considered successful, but it was always a huge effort for a small reward. I was always intimidated by the process.

Like many writers, I started by writing short stories. I needed to learn how to write and stories are the most practical way to do this, and less soul-destroying than working your way through a lengthy novel and then discovering it’s rubbish.

Punk gave you a kind of chutzpah, so even trying to be a writer, I just thought, ‘Well, I’m going to send poems to ‘Radio Times,’ short stories to the ‘Observer,’ just have a go.

I write short stories, and I wrote a play.

David Burnett was the son of Martha Foley, who edited the Best American Short Stories series. She hired me to work with David and her to read stories for the anthology.

I decided to write short stories because they got rejected quicker.

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

I always wrote as a vehicle for expression but did not try writing for publication until my mid-thirties, at which time I started writing for magazines. I wrote essays and then short stories, then moved into novels.

I’ve been writing since I was sixteen. At first, I wrote mostly short stories and poetry. The first thing I ever had published was a poem about a football game. It was printed in my local newspaper.

Every decade, we get a stunning collection of dynamic, heartbreaking short stories. In the past, those collections came from Barry Hannah, Mark Richard, and Thom Jones.

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?

It got to the point where most of my time went toward writing novels. I would still occasionally write short stories, but only when I was commissioned by an editor to write for a themed anthology or special issue.

My favorite short stories are by Alice Munro, especially her collections ‘Carried Away’ and ‘Runaway.’

I started trying to be a writer and failed for years. I tried novels, short stories, sitcoms, movies, plays, anything. And then, to support myself, I had millions of jobs on the fringes of show business.

When I was in college, I wrote poetry very seriously, and then once I had started writing short stories, I didn’t go back to poetry, partially because I felt like I understood how incredibly difficult it was.

Short stories are wonderful and extremely challenging, and the joy of them, because it only takes me three or four months to write, I can take more risks with them. It’s just less of your life invested.

If you look at my last songs and first short stories, there is a real connection between them.

Children can’t help but create: they need to put their mind on the page, they want to paint, to sculpt, to write short stories.

I consider myself a writer. I don’t favour any type of writing. I sometimes wish short stories came more easily to me.

I was always interested in creative writing growing up. From junior high on, I was writing short stories. I also grew up watching movies. My father would take me to everything. Most weeks, I could open the paper having seen every movie listed.

Everything Sholom Aleichem talks about in his plays and his short stories is about people, family, man’s relationship with his God, the breaking down of tradition.

I established my first writing routine when I was 13. The school year had just ended, and I’d won a stack of books for being the best student in a number of subjects. The pile included several 60-leaved notebooks that I decided to fill with short stories.

To be interested in short stories, you have to be interested in fiction as an art form.