Short Story Quotes - Page 11

• 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."

  Ishmael Reed

  Writing, White, Long

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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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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• I used to write my own versions of famous tales, such as William Tell or Robin Hood, and illustrate them myself, too. When I entered my teens, I got more into horror and science fiction and wrote a lot of short stories. A literary education complicated things and for many years I wrote nothing but poetry. Then I got back to story-telling.

  Peter Robinson

  Writing, Years, Robins

  Interview with Sarah Kinson, www.theguardian.com. November 19, 2008.

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• Some worked in collaboration with each other to produce comics as well as short stories.I was partnered with Anita Roy. We critiqued each other's stories. Hers is a corker: future Masterchef. I chortled. There's not a single dud in Eat the Sky.

  Justine Larbalestier

  Sky, Collaboration, Stories

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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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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• I wrote short stories for seven years and used to mail them out. You couldn't send them by e-mail. I called them manila boomerangs. I'd seal the self-addressed stamped envelope inside an envelope and I'd mail it off, and it would come back six weeks later with a rejection letter in it.

  Jess Walter

  Self, Years, Rejection

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I had a lot of expectations placed on me because I was already having some success with my short stories. That was not a good situation to be in. That by itself took a long time to overcome.

  Jess Row

  Long, Expectations, Overcoming

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• It is my belief that we as human beings have a need to tell stories - I think it's evolutionary. So you can think of the short story as a literary form, or you can instead think of stories.

  Aleksandar Hemon

  Thinking, Needs, Stories

  "There Is No Real Life". Interview with Brad Fox, www.guernicamag.com. March 15, 2013.

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• I think that writers have natural canvases, and my canvas, even in short stories, often seems to be the scope of a life.

  Lauren Groff

  Thinking, Stories, Canvas

  Interview with Jason Skipper, therumpus.net. August 24, 2012.

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• 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.

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• [Irony] has everything to do with what Tillie Olsen so powerfully imagined in her short story, "As I Stand Here Ironing" and elaborates on polemically in her 1978 book, Silences, in a chapter first delivered as a talk in 1967. As Olsen clearly saw it for women, my not being a writer was a material consequence of my being a woman - a wife, mother, housewife, and a certain kind of feminist teacher - attentive, one-on-one, face-to-face, nurturing, the kind who receives high ESCI evaluation scores from undergraduates and graduate students.

  Shirley Geok-lin Lim

  Mother, Teacher, Book

  Source: www.oxfordjournals.org

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• I had lots of time to read [being a lawyer] what I hadn't read in my school and college days. Being a bad student I barely passed my exams and I barely bothered about books. It was sports all the time. I started reading and got involved in literature and writing. The few cases I handled gave me the material for my early short stories.

  Khushwant Singh

  Sports, Book, Reading

  Source: unforgettabletarun.blogspot.com

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• Some stories I write in Swedish, some in English. Short stories I've almost exclusively written in English lately, mostly because there's such a small market for them in Sweden and it doesn't really pay either. So, the translation goes both ways. What also factors in is that I have a different voice in English, which means that a straight translation wouldn't be the same as if I'd written it in English originally.

  Karin Tidbeck

  Writing, Mean, Voice

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• I like to write short stories more because I never met a writer who wasn't lazy. And a short story is, by its very definition, short. It is something that generally you can turn out in a week to two weeks depending on how well it goes for you. But, at the same time, it gives the same satisfaction of creating a complete world.

  Stephen King

  Writing, Two, Creating

  Interview with Phil Konstantin, americanindian.net. July 1987.

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• I am drawn to writing books about magic and the supernatural because those are the types of books I like to read. I've written many short stories with realistic settings, and I certainly wouldn't rule out realistic novels in the future!

  Cassandra Clare

  Book, Writing, Magic

  TheFandom.net Interview, www.thefandom.net.

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• With short stories, the story-teller must have a story to tell, not merely some sweet prose to take out for a walk

  Herbert Gold

  Sweet, Stories, Walks

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• The writing process for a short story feels more like field geology, where you keep turning the thing over and over, noting its qualities in detail, hammering at it, putting it near flame, pouring different acids on it, and then finally you figure out what it is, or you just give up and mount it on a ring and have an awkward chunky piece of jewelry that seems weirdly dominating but that you for some reason like. I could be wrong about field geology here.

  Rivka Galchen

  Giving Up, Writing, Flames

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• I see a correlation between short stories and songs, because of their length and for what they're meant to evoke. Combine certain words with melodies and it all becomes very moving.

  Paul Simon

  Song, Moving, Stories

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• Much contemporary verse reads like failed short-short stories rather than failed poetry.

  Alice Fulton

  Poetry, Stories, Literature

  Alice Fulton (1999). “Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry”

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• Always in the short story there is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society.... As a result there is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not often find in the novel--an intense awareness of human loneliness.

  Frank O'Connor

  Loneliness, Stories, Awareness

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

  Dan Chaon

  Stories, Mystery, Built

  "Staying Awake with Dan Chaon". Interview with Clare Stein, www.interviewmagazine.com. February 6, 2012.

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• 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.

  Anthony Doerr

  Writing, Joy, Challenges

  "Off the Page: Anthony Doerr". Live chat, www.washingtonpost.com. October 14, 2004.

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• I'm not a writer. I think I can write short stories and poetry, but film writing, brilliant film writing, is a talent - you can't just do it like that.

  Samantha Morton

  Writing, Thinking, Stories

  "Samantha Morton: 'I was abused for a long time and I retaliated'". Interview with Simon Hattenstone, www.theguardian.com. April 24, 2009.

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• When I was eight years old, I wrote a paragraph-long short story about a goat on my mother's hundred-pound, black-and-white-screen laptop. The story came about largely because I liked the way the word 'goat' looked on the page, but I decided then and there that I wanted to be a writer. That desire never changed.

  Tea Obreht

  Mother, Black And White, Eight

  "Téa Obreht" by Jennifer L. Knox, www.newyorker.com. June 14 & 21, 2010.

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• I found that I could write two kinds of short stories: I could write very absurd, kind of surrealistic, funny stories; or I could write very dark, realistic - hyper-realistic - stories. I was never happy with that, because I couldn't meld the two.

  Dennis Lehane

  Writing, Dark, Two

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com. August 1999.

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