Short Story Quotes - Page 12

• Dylan Nice's Other Kinds is the most extraordinary short-story-col lection debut I have read in years.
  It is a book to be memorized.

  Gary Lutz

  Nice, Book, Years

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• I began writing early - very, very early... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.

  Wole Soyinka

  Art, Writing, School

  FaceBook post by Wole Soyinka from Jan 02, 2015

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• 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.

  Norman Jewison

  Men, Play, People

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• Rueful, bittersweet, funny, written with tenderness and bite, Merrill Feitell's stories, like so many classic short stories, are made from the plain and painful stuff of this world, and haunted by the possibility, and the impossibility, of a better one.

  Michael Chabon

  Stories, World, Stuff

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• Robert Louis Stevenson... I'm focusing on the late short stories that I was ignorant of. I always thought he was a boys' author, but he's not at all.

  Jane Birkin

  Boys, Hair, Ignorant

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• One of the last courses I taught was on the Russian short story, which I love.

  Tobias Wolff

  Love, Stories, Lasts

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• It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time.

  Tobias Wolff

  Time, Past, People

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• I do think that short story writing is often a matter of luck.

  Robert Sheckley

  Writing, Thinking, Luck

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• The many magazines, ranging from pulp to slick, that used to serve as both farm teams for writers and lures to readers, with hundreds of short stories every month, don't exist. Most of the doors for new people have been sealed.

  Donald E. Westlake

  Team, Doors, People

  The Book Reporter interview, www.bookreporter.com. April 21, 2000.

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• I mean, first, almost all writers these days teach because they don't make enough money publishing to live on, to support themselves - people like Tobias Wolff, Anne Beattie, Amy Hempel, Stuart Dybek; a lot of short story writers, for one thing.

  Chad Harbach

  Mean, People, Support

  "Universities Gain Power In Literary World". Interview with Audie Cornish, www.npr.org. December 12, 2010.

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• Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.

  Nell Freudenberger

  Writing, Character, Long

  "Off the Page: Nell Freudenberger". The Washington Post Live Q&As, www.washingtonpost.com. December 12, 2007.

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• Most publishers seem very reluctant to publish short story collections at all; they bring them out in paperback, often disguised as novels.

  John Thomas Sladek

  Stories, Novel, Collections

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• A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.

  Walker Percy

  Fiction, Stories, Novel

  Walker Percy (2011). “Signposts in a Strange Land”, p.77, Open Road Media

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• People who rarely read long books, or even short stories, still appreciate the greatest examples of the shortest literary genres. I have long been fascinated by these short genres. They seem to lie just where my heart is, somewhere between literature and philosophy.

  Gary Saul Morson

  Philosophy, Lying, Book

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• I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

  Tobias Wolff

  Believe, Writing, Different

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• Well, as a short-story writer, I don't think there are any weaknesses to the genre itself. I guess I would say that the difficulty of the form is that one must create an entire world in five to 30 pages, as opposed to 300. There is very little room for fat - you must be economical. And you must begin as close to the end as you possibly can.

  ZZ Packer

  Writing, Thinking, Weakness

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• 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.

  John Sayles

  Writing, Thinking, Stories

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• 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.

  Mikhail Bulgakov

  Night, Stories, Towns

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• I started writing about New York as soon as I arrived. I was 19. I used to write short stories and send them out.

  Candace Bushnell

  New York, Writing, Stories

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• A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see.

  Dan Chaon

  Stories, World, Kind

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

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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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