Short Story Quotes - Page 4

• 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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• 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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• 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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• One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Dream, Morning, Book

  "Gabriel García Márquez, The Art of Fiction No. 69". Interview with Peter H. Stone, www.theparisreview.org. 1981.

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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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• I've written about 2,000 short stories; I've only published 300 and I feel I'm still learning. Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as a writer. Ray Bradbury, 1967 interview (Doing the Math - that means for every story he sold, he wrote six "un-publishable" ones. Keep typing!)

  Ray Bradbury

  Mean, Math, Men

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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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• So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, People, Dying

  Flannery O'Connor (2014). “Mystery and Manners”, p.50, Faber & Faber

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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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• I think of myself as a writer who photographs. Images, for me, can be considered poems, short stories or essays. And I've always thought the best place for my photographs was inside books of my own creation.

  Sam Abell

  Book, Thinking, Stories

  "A Life in Photos: Q&A with Sam Abell". Interview with Jenny Wells, uknow.uky.edu. July 20, 2012.

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• You know, I once read a short story about how much you could tell about people from their shoes. You could tell where they had been, what they did, whether they were real walkers.

  Elizabeth Edwards

  Real, Shoes, People

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• I have a musical called Goodbye and Good Luck, based on a Grace Paley short story. I also have King Island Christmas, and there are 20 different productions of it this year.

  David Friedman

  Christmas, Goodbye, Kings

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• I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

  Neil Gaiman

  Art, Thinking, Stories

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• I've been many kinds of writers in my career: novelist; tele-playwright; short story writer. As a high-school student, I wrote amateur pieces for fanzines, and I've written for Hollywood.

  George R. R. Martin

  School, Careers, Hollywood

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• Start with short stories. After all, if you were taking up rock climbing, you wouldn't start with Mount Everest. So if you're starting fantasy, don't start with a nine-book series.

  George R. R. Martin

  Book, Rocks, Climbing

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Lying, Long, Stories

  Joyce Carol Oates, Lee Milazzo (1989). “Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates”, p.65, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• All of my problems are rather complicated - I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It's like a personal therapy.

  Manuel Puig

  Movie, Needs, Stories

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• We all dream dreams of unity, of purity; we all dream that there's an authoritative voice out there that will explain things, including ourselves. If it wasn't for our longing for these things, I doubt the novel or the short story would exist in its current form. I'm not going to say much more on the topic. Just remember: In dictatorships, only one person is really allowed to speak. And when I write a book or a story, I too am the only one speaking, no matter how I hide behind my characters.

  Junot Diaz

  Dream, Book, Writing

  "Questions for Junot Díaz". Interview with Meghan O'Rourke, www.slate.com. April 8, 2008.

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• If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?

  Jennifer Weiner

  Writing, Stories, Novel

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• I started a short story but it was so dreary that even my pen threw up.

  Jonathan Carroll

  Stories, Pens, Dreary

  Jonathan Carroll (2012). “Kissing the Beehive”, p.6, Open Road Media

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• If you write a hundred short stories and they're all bad, that doesn't mean you've failed. You fail only if you stop writing.

  Ray Bradbury

  Writing, Mean, Stories

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• Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last.

  Marisha Pessl

  Sweet, Epic, Greek

  Marisha Pessl (2006). “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, p.84, Penguin

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• Even when there's not a joke or a hook, the first line has to be good and snapem to attention. Songs ain't novels. You don't have 30 pages to slowly wrap somebody in. They're more like short stories or poems. If the first line hasn't grabbed them, you won't get to the second line. Once you've developed an audience, you may have some luxury and trust, so you don't have to knock 'em over the head with line one.

  Dan Bern

  Song, Writing, Luxury

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• Over the years I have forged intimate familial ties with these characters, who are reflections of a portion of myself. Consequently, even a character who appeared only once in a short story waits now in the wings, concealed by the curtain, for his next appearance on-stage. Not one of them has ever broken free of his familial ties with me and disappeared for ever - at least, not within the confines of my heart.

  Shusaku Endo

  Heart, Character, Reflection

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• When you send off a short story, it sits on the editor's desk in the same pile with stories by the most famous and honored names in present-day writing-and it's not going to be accepted unless it's as good as theirs. (And it'll probably have to be better.)

  Daniel Quinn

  Writing, Editors, Names

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