Short Story Quotes - Page 16

• 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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• 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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• I decided to write short stories because they got rejected quicker.

  Caroline B. Cooney

  Writing, Stories, Rejected

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• Learn a lot about the world and finish things, even if it is just a short story. Finish it before you start something else. Finish it before you start rewriting it. That's really important.
  It's to find out if you're going to be a writer or not, because that's one of the most important lessons.
  Most, maybe 90% of people, will start writing and never finish what they started. If you want to be a writer that's the hardest and most important lesson: Finish it. Then go back to fix it.

  Tad Williams

  Writing, People, Important

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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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• When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my training in this medium.

  Truman Capote

  Writing, Insightful, Training

  " Truman Capote's previously unknown boyhood tales published" by Philip Oltermann, www.theguardian.com. October 9, 2014.

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• If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced that there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes but by no means always find the way to do it.

  John Steinbeck

  Lying, Writing, Mean

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• 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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• A major boom in real stock prices in the US after Black Tuesday brought them halfway back to 1929 levels by 1930. This was followed by a second crash, another boom from 1932 to 1937, and a third crash. Speculative bubbles do not end like a short story, novel, or play. There is no final denouement that brings all the strands of a narrative into an impressive final conclusion. In the real world, we never know when the story is over.

  Robert J. Shiller

  Real, Play, Tuesday

  "Speculative bubbles don't just pop - they may deflate and reflate" by Robert J. Shiller, www.theguardian.com. July 19, 2013.

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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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• Scrivener is where I live. I'm planning the next novel, two screenplays and a couple of short stories with it and it's amazing how fluid the software makes the process. I genuinely think this is the biggest software advance for writers since the word processor.

  Michael Marshall Smith

  Couple, Thinking, Two

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• A good short story is a work of art which daunts us in proportion to its brevity.... No inspiration is too noble for it; no amountof hard work is too severe for it.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Art, Inspiration, Hard Work

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• I find that short stories are almost like palate cleansers, or brain cleansers.

  Jami Attenberg

  Brain, Stories, Palate

  "Book Release: The Melting Season". Interview with Natasha Clark, www.elle.com. January 22, 2010.

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• I found myself sitting at the computer, and I thought I was going to write a kind of simple nostalgic story about two boys and their love of kite fighting. But stories have a will of their own, and this one turned out to be this dark tale about betrayal, loss, regret. The short story which was about 25 pages long sat around for a couple of years.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Couple, Betrayal, Regret

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

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• What the short story needs above all is for one of the big publishers to get an equivalent series up and running and to support it and promote it.

  Nicholas Royle

  Running, Support, Needs

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Though The Kite Runner was my first completed novel, I had been writing on and off for most of my life, primarily short stories, and primarily for myself.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Writing, 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 like to envision the creation of a short story collection as being like putting together a jazz album. Yes, there's logic and literary structures imposed by me, but at the same time, all the tracks are shaped and ordered in a much more improvisational manner. The guiding principle for me is whether or not a story adds a layer or texture to the overall collection.

  Daniel Olivas

  Track, Together, Logic

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• I've written over 100 short stories. You could say I'm obsessed with short stories.

  Nicholas Royle

  Stories, Obsessed, Written

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The short story feels like the most natural length for prose fiction, or certainly for the kind of ideas and situations I like to encounter.

  Nicholas Royle

  Ideas, Encounters, Fiction

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I had a short story collection come out in 2006, and then I couldn't work on large projects for a long time because I was finishing my doctoral degree.

  Theodora Goss

  Long, Finishing, Degrees

  Source: www.sfsignal.com

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• I'll give you the whole secret to short story writing. Here it is. Rule 1: Write stories that please yourself. There is no Rule 2.

  O. Henry

  Writing, Giving, Secret

  O. Henry (1993). “Collected Stories of O. Henry”, Gramercy Books

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• Writing is my number one passion. I've written two novels. I've written a screenplay. I also write short stories and poetry.

  Evangeline Lilly

  Passion, Writing, Numbers

  Source: www.justjared.com

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• I wanted to be a visual artist, but I realized I was more affected by what I read than by what I saw. I would go to a show at a museum and look at a painting and say, 'Oh I wish I owned that,' and that would be the end of my relationship with a painting. With a short story I would read or with an author I would discover I could be haunted. It would affect my mood and affect the way that I saw the world. I thought, wow, it would be amazing to be able to do that.

  David Sedaris

  Artist, Wish, World

  "David Sedaris diaries are mundane, profane, downright odd". The Associated Press Interview, abcnews.go.com. June 2, 2017.

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• I used to take my short stories to girls' homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

  Ray Bradbury

  Girl, Reading, Home

  "From the archive: Ray Bradbury on life, love and Buck Rogers". Interview with John Ezard, www.theguardian.com. June 7, 2012.

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• As a teenager I wrote to R.A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with letters that were like R.A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones.

  Neil Gaiman

  Teenager, Simple, Stories

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