Short Story Quotes - Page 14

• Writing the short story is essentially an act of grace. It's not a matter of will so much as trust. I try to let the story do some of the work for me. It knows what it wants to do, say, be. I try not to stand in its way.

  Paulette Alden

  Writing, Grace, Trying

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• 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.

  Sarah Dessen

  Writing, School, Trying

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• TV has a longer narrative, and TV's more like short stories. So there's less rules with TV; you can make it a little bit different. [With] movies, the medium has more constraints, so it was just about what stories are the most cinematic and the best resolution.

  Tucker Max

  Different, Stories, Littles

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• While the novel-writer aims at an eminently natural method of transcription, the author of the short story adopts a very artificial one

  Henry Seidel Canby

  Stories, Natural, Method

  Henry Seidel Canby (1902). “The Short Story”

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• Songwriters are expanding time rather than compressing time. My short stories tend to be old fashioned, with a beginning, middle and end.

  Steve Earle

  Stories, Beginning Middle And End, Ends

  Interview with Joshua Klein, pitchfork.com. October 8, 2007.

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• In my short stories there's a lot of focus on people successfully and not successfully responding to some sorts of discomforts or instabilities.

  Leni Zumas

  People, Focus, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

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• In general, short stories are less read than before, they're less published than before and, not surprisingly, they're less taught than before.

  Lorin Stein

  Stories, Taught

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I regret that there aren't more short stories in other magazines. But in a certain way, I think the disappearance of the short-story template from everyone's head can be freeing. Partly because there's no mass market for stories, the form is up for grabs. It can be many, many things. So the anthology is very much intended for students, but I think we're all in the position of writing students now. Very few people are going around with a day-to-day engagement with the short story.

  Lorin Stein

  Regret, Writing, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I like fiction that deals with matters that are of burning importance to us in our private lives. And not all short stories are like that. In general, short stories - and maybe this is a little bit off-topic - but I think short stories have this bad association with, like, waiting rooms.

  Lorin Stein

  Bad Ass, Thinking, Waiting Rooms

  Source: therumpus.net

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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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• 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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• So, short stories have an even harder time, because they tend to get read during the day, between other things. They're interstitial. And yet the content of short stories tends to be very much "nighttime" content.

  Lorin Stein

  Stories, Nighttime, Harder

  Source: therumpus.net

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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 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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• Readers tend to devour short stories on a newssheet, but would be disinclined to read them in collections

  L.P. Hartley

  Would Be, Stories, Reader

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• The first thing we see about a short story is its mystery. And in the best short stories, we return at the last to see mystery again

  Eudora Welty

  Best Short, Stories, Lasts

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• You could omit anything if you knew that the omitted part would strengthen the short story and make people feel something more than they understood

  Ernest Hemingway

  People, Stories, Feels

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• The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime

  Bernard Malamud

  Self, Stories, Pages

  Bernard Malamud (1984). “The Stories of Bernard Malamud”

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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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• The thing I like so much about short stories is that there isn't as much of an investment of time so I'm free to experiment more. If it doesn't work out, I've only lost a week or two of work. If I screw up a novel I've lost at least a year's worth of work. But the nice thing is that those experiments with short stories can be carried over to novels when the experiments do work.

  Charles de Lint

  Nice, Years, Two

  "EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Charles de Lint". Interview with Charles Tan, www.sfsignal.com. September 9, 2010.

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• A short story is like a kiss in the dark.

  Stephen King

  Dark, Kissing, Stories

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• Do three things each night before you go to bed: read a poem, read a short story, read an essay.

  Ray Bradbury

  Night, Bed, Three

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• The majority of American writers today have chosen passive non-resistance to things as they are, producing sloughs of poetry about their personal angst and anomie, cascades of short stories and rivers of novels obsessed with the nuances of domestic relationships - suburban hanky-panky - chic boutique shopping mall literary soap opera. When they do speak out on matters of controversy they attack not the evils of our time but fellow writers who may insist on complaining.

  Edward Abbey

  Speaks Out, Shopping, Rivers

  Edward Abbey (1988). “One Life at a Time, Please”, p.172, Macmillan

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• Writing a short story is a little like walking into a dark room, finding a light and turning it on. The light is the end of the story.

  Dan Chaon

  Writing, Dark, Light

  "An Interview With Ficton Writer Dan Chaon". Interview with Sara Peyton, www.pw.org. July 19, 2004.

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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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