Short Story Quotes - Page 12

• 'The Blade Itself' was my first book. Probably I should've tried a few short stories first, but for some reason I decided to begin with Everest.

  Joe Abercrombie

  Book, Stories, Firsts

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• Composition is interesting because, in a sense, you always have to let it go. Unless you're a true composer/performer, you're always sending a PDF and then someone else makes it. It's like instructions for a short story, faxed to every English student who's studying it.

  Nico Muhly

  Interesting, Let It Go, Stories

  Interview with Sean Michaels, believermag.com. October 1, 2008.

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• Chekhov used to correspond with aspiring writers, and once he gave this advice to Maxim Gorky when he was encouraging him to pare his wordy sentences: "When someone expends the least amount of motion on a given action, that's grace." The short story, by definition, embodies this notion of grace, because it requires such forceful compression to achieve its effects.

  Catherine Brady

  Advice, Grace, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I started writing little short stories and poems as soon as I learned to read and write. I think I was six years old. And then when I got to be eleven, twelve, and into my teens, I was just listening to records all the time, and I got a guitar. I started to take guitar lessons when I was twelve.

  Lucinda Williams

  Writing, Thinking, Guitar

  "An Interview with Lucinda Williams". The Believer Magazine, Issue Ninety-One, believermag.com. July 1, 2012.

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

  PJ Harvey

  Song, Stories

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I'm one of those writers who started off writing novels and came to writing short stories later, partly because I didn't have the right ideas, partly because I think that short stories are more difficult. I think learning to write short stories also made me attracted toward a paring down of the novel form.

  Julian Barnes

  Writing, Thinking, Ideas

  "Conversation: Julian Barnes, Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize". "Art Beat" with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. November 8, 2011.

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• In March of 2001, I revisited the short story, and found that thought it did not work well as a short story, it might work much better as a longer one. The novel [The Kite Runner] came about as an expansion of that original, unpublished short story.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Expansion, Stories, Kites

  "GeekDad Interview: Khaled Hosseini, Author of The Kite Runner". Interview with Tony Sims, www.wired.com. September 30, 2011.

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• I never wanted to be an editor. I never wanted to be a boss. I just wanted to write, and it didn't make any difference whether it was fiction or nonfiction or short stories or whatever. I just - that's what I was destined to do.

  Frank Deford

  Writing, Editors, Differences

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Crude at first [the short story] received a literary polish in the press, but its dominant quality remained. It was concise and condense, yet suggestive. It was delightfully extravagant - or a miracle of understatement

  Bret Harte

  Miracle, Quality, Stories

  Bret Harte (2001). “The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Writings”, p.218, Penguin

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• Tom Kealey might be my favorite short story writer and this astonishing collection is long overdue.

  Stephen Elliott

  Long, Story Writers, Stories

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• A lot of people who want to see the short story have a renaissance of readership - they tend to think of short stories, and sometimes poems too, as being well-suited to the way we now live, with all of these broken-up bits of time. I hope they're right, but my sense is that our fiction reading has become, if anything, more cherished as a kind of escape from fragmentation.

  Lorin Stein

  Reading, Thinking, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Even while I was working on the novel I would also write short stories as relief, just to be in a wieldier world that could negotiated more easily and more quickly. In the novel, I even changed the narrator from a man to a woman.

  Leni Zumas

  Writing, Men, Narrators

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The short story is so much about inevitability and this feeling that things always had to be this one way, and I wanted the apocalypses to blow that idea apart. I hope it feels that way. I hope the book invites people to read the stories in order and then, if they feel like it, maybe not read them in order the next time.

  Lucy Corin

  Book, Blow, Order

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I decided to make myself a little less precious with my storytelling. I think you can see from the first three pieces in the book that I have a long term relationship with the short story as a form and I really love an elegantly crafted story that has several elements that come together in a way that is emotionally complex and different from when we started. That kind of crystalline, perfect, idealized thing that the short story as a genre has come to represent.

  Lucy Corin

  Book, Thinking, Perfect

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Through panel moderations and talks around culture, politics and identity I gradually gained opportunities to write in my own voice and not that of the brand. I'm interested in a lot of the languages that drive our culture. I'm interested in user experience as language or how societal malaise takes root. So through essays and short stories I began exploring some of these things.

  Michael Salu

  Writing, Opportunity, Identity

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• But it's hard for me to pinpoint where all my characters and dialogue come from - imagination or real life. My memoir, of course, was all about my past, and many of the short stories cleave very closely to my life, but the more stories I wrote in the collection, the more that seemed to be invented, but who knows... I think I'm writing about a young woman with acne who shoplifts, but I'm really writing about myself.

  Said Sayrafiezadeh

  Real, Writing, Character

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I notice a lot of younger artists have difficulty telling stories. They might have short stories where they express themselves well, but they don't really know how to tell stories with characters. That craft just passed them by.

  Gilberto Hernandez Guerrero

  Character, Artist, Difficulty

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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

  Roy Kesey

  Stories, Reins, Camps

  Source: therumpus.net

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• From personal experience, I completely agree that it is often easier to go for monotone sadness. When I was starting out, I wrote a gazillion short stories that ran the gamut of human suffering - drug addiction, child abuse, terminal illness, loved ones dying by all manner of misfortune, etc. In hindsight, it's clear that I mistook the power of the situation for the power of the story.

  Anthony Marra

  Children, Sadness, Addiction

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The short story that eventually grew into Constellation was the first fiction set in Russia that I'd ever written, and that was right around the time I was giving up on a doomed, never-to-be-seen first novel. While I saw it could be something bigger, in hindsight fortuitous timing was as responsible as anything.

  Anthony Marra

  Giving Up, Russia, Saws

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I don't revise a lot when writing short stories. As far as the novel, I definitely thought more about plot. Honestly, I'm still pretty confused about what "plot" means. I've been reading some of my Goodreads reviews and one reader noted that the The Last Days of California "reads like a short story stretched to the breaking point, padded and brought into novel range..." I don't know what people want, really.

  Mary J. Miller

  Confused, Reading, Mean

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I don't ever think about the utility of fiction. I don't believe in it or certainly don't require anybody to consider it. A novel or short story might be useful to a reader in all kinds of ways, many of which no writer would ever foresee, which is a good thing.

  Francisco Goldman

  Believe, Thinking, Kind

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I've been writing songs since I was like six or seven. I've been writing poetry and short stories and stuff, but my first serious, serious song, I wrote when I was fourteen.

  Gabrielle Aplin

  Song, Writing, Stories

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• Once I had started, I discovered the secret pleasure of writing a novel. It's such an immersive, deep commitment. With short stories, you're continually having to start again from scratch, but with a novel you only need one good idea every few years.

  Debra Dean

  Writing, Commitment, Years

  Source: therumpus.net

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• In college I wrote for the university newspaper, and I had several short stories published in small press. I think it's just been a natural progression of where to go with the imagination and not have to grow up.

  Gabriel Campisi

  Growing Up, College, Thinking

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

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