Short Story Quotes - Page 4

• Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.

  W. H. Auden

  Writing, Night, People

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• I write very raw, ugly, illiterate first drafts very quickly (novels are always in first draft in under a year) and then I spend years and years fine-tuning, revising, editing, etc. What inspires me? Who knows. I am not inspired that much. That’s why I write long form fiction - I am not much of a short story writer. Ideas come seldom, but when a good one comes, I really stick to it and see it out. I’m a problem-solver - I've never thrown out an entire manuscript; I've always forced myself to repair it until it was a lovable thing again.

  Porochista Khakpour

  Writing, Editing, Years

  "Beyond Diaspora: Porochista Khakpour". Interview with Roxanne Naseem Rashedi, lareviewofbooks.org. February 17, 2013.

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

  Isabel Allende

  Inspiration, Hard Work, Stories

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• A love affair is like a short story--it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and well knit with that element of revelatory surprise as a well-written story should be, it usually dissipated in a succession of messy and humiliating anticlimaxes.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Stories, Elements, Might

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• 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.

  Mary Lavin

  Thinking, Insightful, Stories

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• Short stories and some short novels are close to poetry--with the fewest words they capture the essence of a situation, of a human being. It's like trying to pin down the eternal moment.

  Gina Berriault

  Essence, Trying, Stories

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• Don’t try to write a novel. Write short stories and then figure out how to connect them.

  Ray Bradbury

  Writing, Trying, Stories

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• In all honesty, at that time, I never saw myself as an author... I was just a Mom in a state of panic, trying to enter a short story contest to win the prize money in order to keep the lights on in my home.

  Leslie Banks

  Mom, Honesty, Home

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• When I’m a teacher, I won’t be using red pens to grade papers. Red pens will forever be associated with criticism and bad grades in my mind. I don’t want this person to get their short story back with harsh red pen marks all over it. Purple is much friendlier.

  Susane Colasanti

  Teacher, Purple, Forever

  Susane Colasanti (2012). “Keep Holding On”, p.58, Penguin

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• Within a scantily plotted, novella-style narrative (the movie is an adaptation of a short story by Tom Bissell), single shots become story events that mere mention would spoil.

  Karina Longworth

  Style, Events, Stories

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• There's little question that short stories, like poetry, don't get the respect they deserve in the culture - but what can you do? Like Canute, one cannot fight the sea, you have to go with your love, and hope one day, things change.

  Junot Diaz

  Fighting, Sea, One Day

  Interview with Gina Frangello, therumpus.net. September 30, 2012.

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• 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.

  Satyajit Ray

  Two, Long, Stories

  Satyajit Ray, Bert Cardullo (2007). “Satyajit Ray: Interviews”, p.95, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• I was free.  Every day, when you're on the run, is the whole of your life.  Every free minute is a short story with a happy ending.

  Gregory David Roberts

  Running, Stories, Happy Endings

  Gregory David Roberts (2004). “Shantaram: A Novel”, p.23, Macmillan

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• Long fiction is wonderful and you can lose yourself in it as a reader and as a writer, but short stories don't allow the same kind of immersion. Often the best stories hold you back and make you witness them. This may be one of the reasons some people reject the form. That and the fact that they are harder work to read. A story will not let you get comfortable and settle in. It is like a stool that is so small that you must always be aware of sitting.

  Isobelle Carmody

  Writing, Long, People

  Isobelle Carmody, Nan McNab (2011). “The Wilful Eye (Tales from the Tower Volume One)”, p.3, Allen & Unwin

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

  Isobelle Carmody

  Lying, Writing, Suggestions

  Isobelle Carmody, Nan McNab (2011). “The Wilful Eye (Tales from the Tower Volume One)”, p.3, Allen & Unwin

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• I think Willa Cather did a short story called "Paul's Case," and in it, when he finally commits suicide, it says, "He surrendered to the black design of things." And that's what I anticipate death will be: a totally unconscious void in which you float through eternity with no particular consciousness of anything. I think once around is enough. I don't want to start it all over again.

  Rod Serling

  Suicide, Thinking, Design

  Source: www.rodserling.com

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• My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever

  Irwin Shaw

  Story Writers, Stories, My Favorite

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• I didn't intend to become a short-story writer. I became one because I finished a couple of short stories and realized that's what I wanted to do and could do with children and with all the other things in my life.

  Grace Paley

  Children, Couple, Story Writers

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• A short story is a writer's way of thinking through experience... Journalism aims at accuracy, but fiction's aim is truth. The writer distorts reality in the interest of a larger truth.

  John L'Heureux

  Reality, Thinking, Fiction

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• 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

  Laura Hillenbrand

  Writing, Choices, Childhood

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• I am also working on a couple of short stories for anthologies. This is new to me and Im enjoying it.

  Judith Guest

  Couple, Stories, Anthology

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• But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels.

  Jonathan Coe

  Book, Writing, Stories

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• A form wherein we can enjoy simultaneously what is best in both the novel and the short story form. My plan was to create a book that affords readers some of the novel's long-form pleasures but that also contains the short story's ability to capture what is so difficult about being human - the brevity of our moments, their cruel irrevocability.

  Junot Diaz

  Book, Long, Stories

  Interview with Gina Frangello, therumpus.net. September 30, 2012.

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• Don’t let people interfere with you. Boot ’em out, turn off the phone, hide away, get it done. If you carry a short story over to the next day you may overnight intellectualize something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone.

  Ray Bradbury

  Phones, Next Day, People

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• Once you have learned to trust your own voice and allowed that creative force inside you to come out, you can direct it to write short stories, novels, and poetry, do revisions, and so on. You have the basic tool to fulfill your writing dreams. But beware. This type of writing will uncover other dreams you have, too-going to Tibet, being the first woman president of the United States, building a solar studio in New Mexico-and they will be in black and white. It will be harder to avoid them.

  Natalie Goldberg

  Dream, Writing, Black And White

  Natalie Goldberg (2016). “Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within”, p.75, Shambhala Publications

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