Short Story Quotes - Page 3

• Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Writing, Story Writers, Details

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• (The short story) is a form that has all the power of the novel - some would say more - but none of the self-importance.

  Joseph O'Connor

  Self, Stories, Form

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• There's a joy in writing short stories, a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off.

  Tobias Wolff

  Writing, Joy, 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. I would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them.

  Dan Chaon

  World, Kind, Mystery

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Who reads short stories? one is asked, and I like to think that they are read by men and women in the dentist's office, waiting to be called to the chair; they are read on transcontinental plane trips instead of watching banal and vulgar films spin out the time between our coasts; they are read by discerning and well-informed men and women who seem to feel that narrative fiction can contribute to our understanding of one another and the sometimes bewildering world around us.

  John Cheever

  Men, Thinking, Office

  John Cheever, Blake Bailey (2009). “John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings”

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• Short stories amount for the most part to parlour tricks, party favours with built-in snappers, gadgets for including recognition and reversals

  Howard Nemerov

  Party, Stories, Gadgets

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• Short story writers simply do what human beings have always done. They write stories because they have to; because they cannot rest until they have tried as hard as they can to write the stories. They cannot rest because they are human, and all of us need to speak into the silence of mortality, to interrupt and ever so briefly stop that quiet flow, and with stories try to understand at least some of it.

  Andre Dubus

  Writing, Silence, Trying

  Andre Dubus (2010). “Broken Vessels: Essays”, p.57, Open Road Media

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• When people ask, "Is there any advice you'd give a young writer?," I say write short stories. They afford lots of failure. Pastiche is a great way to start.

  Ian Mcewan

  Writing, People, Giving

  Ian McEwan, Ryan Roberts (2010). “Conversations with Ian McEwan”, Univ Pr of Mississippi

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• Great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication-theorists sometimes called "exformation," which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient.

  David Foster Wallace

  Communication, Insightful, Connections

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• A short story is "a short prose narrative, requiring from a half hour, to one or two hours in its perusal...having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Unique, Two, Care

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• When you write a novel you have to live with the characters for a long time. So I prefer short stories. I never wrote anything more than 250 pages.

  Ruskin Bond

  Writing, Character, Long

  Source: www.abhijitbhaduri.com

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• I love the short story for being round, suggestive, insinuating, microcosmic. The story has both the inconvenience and the fascination of new beginnings.

  Luisa Valenzuela

  New Beginnings, Fascination, Stories

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• I always was interested in prose. As a teenager, I published short stories. And I always wanted to write the long short story, I wanted to write a novel. Now that I have attained, shall I say, a respectable age, and have had experiences, I feel much more interested in prose, in the novel. I feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in dally life, and I find this more difficult in poetry.

  Sylvia Plath

  Teenager, Writing, Long

  Source: www.english.illinois.edu

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• When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.

  Mario Batali

  Dirty, Book, Writing

  "The Traditions of the Table". Interview with Bruce Cole, www.neh.gov. 2004.

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• I was cautious in what I said before the young lady; for I could not be sure that she was sane; and, in fact, there was a certain restless brilliancy about her eyes that half led me to imagine she was not.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Eye, Half, Facts

  Edgar Allan Poe, Stuart Levine, Susan Levine (1976). “The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition”, p.597, University of Illinois Press

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• My first serious attempts at writing were made in 1868, and I took up two very different lines of composition; I wrote some short stories of a very flimsy type, and also a work of a much more ambitious character, 'The Lives of the Black Letter Saints.'

  Annie Besant

  Writing, Character, Two

  Annie Besant (1893). “Annie Besant: An Autobiography”

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• I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn't think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

  Paul Auster

  Thinking, Age, Stories

  "American dreams" by Hadley Freeman, www.theguardian.com. October 26, 2002.

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• A love affair is like a short story--it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and well knit with that element of revelatory surprise as a well-written story should be, it usually dissipated in a succession of messy and humiliating anticlimaxes.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Stories, Elements, Might

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• Most of my short stories are fantasy.

  Ray Bradbury

  Stories, Fantasy

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• Don’t try to write a novel. Write short stories and then figure out how to connect them.

  Ray Bradbury

  Writing, Trying, Stories

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• As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and examining it. ...This is our life and it's not going to last forever. There isn't time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write.

  Natalie Goldberg

  Live Life, Writing, Second Chance

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• A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.

  Isabel Allende

  Inspiration, Hard Work, Stories

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• A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don't run out of energy (or in the case of the novelist-- ideas) because they have so far to run. To mix the metaphor, writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.

  Jonathan Carroll

  Running, Writing, Ideas

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• In Mosca’s experience, a ‘long story’ was always a short story someone did not want to tell.

  Frances Hardinge

  Long, Stories, Want

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• Yes, we could talk to you for days on end about all the bad first dates. Those are stories. Funny stories. Awkward stories. Stories we love to share, because by sharing them, we get something out of the hour or two we wasted on the wrong person. But that's all bad first dates are: short stories. Good first dates are more than short stories. They are first chapters. On a good first date, everything is springtime. And when a good first date becomes a relationship, the springtime lingers. Even after it's over, there can be springtime.

  David Levithan

  Two, Awkward, Stories

  David Levithan (2014). “Two Boys Kissing”, p.21, Egmont UK

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