Short Story Quotes - Page 21

• These short stories establish Sontag's originality . . . her unique vision, her success with experiments in the form . . . Sontag makes a wonderful stew of the past, the life caught in memory and imagination, serves it all up lavishly laced with silences, and provides us with a gourmand's series of short courses.

  Doris Grumbach

  Memories, Unique, Past

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• One of my favorite writers is short story writer/essayist Jorge Luis Borges, who was blind. I'm not claiming to be anything remotely resembling a talent of Borges' caliber, but he is an inspiration and a proof that one can be a meaningful and successful writer while blind.

  Larry Howes

  Meaningful, Inspiration, Successful

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• I write movies, so - I look at boxing, and I commentated on it, as if I were telling you the story of a movie or a short story.

  Ferdie Pacheco

  Writing, Boxing, Looks

  Source: www.nbcnews.com

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• I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice.

  Andre Dubus

  Short Love, Pain, Believe

  Andre Dubus (2010). “Broken Vessels: Essays”, p.81, Open Road Media

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• In short stories it is better to say not enough than to say too much, because, because--I don't know why.

  Anton Chekhov

  Stories, Too Much, Enough

  Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1964). “Letters on the short story, the drama, and other literary topics”

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• Idea for a short story. The shore of a lake, a young girl who's spent her whole life beside it, a girl like you She loves the lake the way a seagull does, and she's happy and free as a seagull. Then a man comes along, sees her, and ruins her life because he has nothing better to do. Destroys her like this seagull here.

  Anton Chekhov

  Girl, Men, Lakes

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• I wanted to avoid what some modern tellers have done, quite legitimately, to make fairy tales more like novels and short stories, to characterize the heroes and the heroines much more than they are characterized in Grimm. I like the psychological flatness of them, the fact that they're more like masks than individuals.

  Philip Pullman

  Hero, Stories, Done

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• A short story is confined to one mood, to which everything in the story pertains. Characters, setting, time, events, are all subject to the mood. And you can try more ephemeral, more fleeting things in a story - you can work more by suggestion - than in a novel. Less is resolved, more is suggested, perhaps.

  Eudora Welty

  Character, Insightful, Trying

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• In a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter.

  Annie Proulx

  House, Insightful, Story Writers

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• Having made films, I know very well that the scope of the average 90- to 120-minute movie is about the same narrative heft as a long short story or a novella.

  Paul Auster

  Average, Long, Stories

  Interview with Gregg LaGambina, www.avclub.com. September 6, 2008.

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• Works of art are not so much finished as abandoned. Perhaps poems can be perfect. A short-short story might even be perfectible, as effective and enjoyable for one reader as the next. But novels and other book-length narratives are great rambling things that always contain some flaws. For works of any length, there comes a point when your continued tinkering won't improve the whole, but will just trade one set of problems for another.

  Bruce Holland Rogers

  Art, Book, Perfect

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• The short story is the literature of the nomad.

  John Cheever

  Stories, Literature, Nomad

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• For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.

  Eudora Welty

  Stories, Emotion, Speak

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• Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand; a short story is a romance, a relationship; a novel is a marriage-one has to be cunning, devise compromises, and make sacrifices.

  Amos Oz

  Writing, Sacrifice, Night

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• Here in Manto's own words that he wanted to mark his grave with: "In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto and with him lie buried all the secrets and mysteries of the art of short-story writing.... Under tons of earth he lies, still wondering who among the two is greater short-story writer: God or He.

  Saadat Hasan Manto

  Art, Lying, Writing

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• To create anything — whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom — is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic. These essays are about that magic — which is sometimes perilous, sometimes infectious, sometimes fragile, sometimes failed, sometimes infuriating, sometimes triumphant, and sometimes tragic. I went up there. I wrote. I tried to see.

  Tom Bissell

  Believe, Magic, Stories

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• The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one.

  Lawrence Block

  Writing, Stories, World

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• I write all the time. I do artwork that's part of a diary, and I write short stories to go with them pretty much every day.

  Mark Mothersbaugh

  Writing, Diaries, Stories

  "Mark Mothersbaugh Revisits His Literary Roots". Interview with Danielle Wiener-Bronner, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 09, 2012.

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• David Burnett was the son of Martha Foley, who edited the Best American Short Stories series. She hired me to work with David and her to read stories for the anthology.

  Terry Southern

  Son, Stories, Anthology

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• I would recommend the short story form, which is a lot harder to write since you have to be so careful with words, until there is plenty of time to doodle through a novel

  Anne McCaffrey

  Writing, Stories, Form

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• I’m a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry’s poetry. It doesn’t have to be called a poem, you know.

  Tennessee Williams

  Drama, Play, Stories

  Tennessee Williams, David Ernest Roessel (2007). “The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams”, p.21, New Directions Publishing

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• Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.

  Walter Kirn

  Insightful, Fiction, Stories

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• Short stories do not say this happened and this happened and this happened. They are a microcosm and a magnification rather than a linear progression.

  Isobelle Carmody

  Writing, Insightful, Stories

  Isobelle Carmody, Nan McNab (2011). “The Wilful Eye (Tales from the Tower Volume One)”, p.4, Allen & Unwin

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• Debasement was limited at first to one’s own territory. It was then found that one could do better by taking bad coins across the border of neighboring municipalities and exchanging them for good with ignorant common people, bringing back the good coins and debasing them again. More and more mints were established. Debasement accelerated in hyper-fashion until a halt was called after the subsidiary coins became practically worthless, and children played with them in the street, much as recounted in Leo Tolstoy’s short story, Ivan the Fool.

  Charles P. Kindleberger

  Fashion, Children, People

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• For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

  Lynn Abbey

  Writing, Stories, Novel

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