Writing Short Stories Quotes

• Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Writing, Story Writers, Details

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• Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Writing, Long, Insightful

  Letter to Harrison Blake, 16 Nov. 1857 See Pascal 1; Woodrow Wilson 25

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• A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, 'Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can't forget me, there's still more to write!' Impelled by that voice, I would find myself writing a novel. In this sense, too, my short stories and novels connect inside me in a very natural, organic way.

  Haruki Murakami

  Writing, Sleep, Night

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• You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.

  Larry Niven

  Writing, Stories, Story Writers

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• A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Writing, Insightful, Story Writers

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• A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

  Lorrie Moore

  Writing, Stories, Film

  FaceBook post by Lorrie Moore from Jul 23, 2012

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• 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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• If you do not have an alert and curious interest in character and dramatic situation, if you have no visual imagination and are unable to distinguish between honest emotional reactions and sentimental approaches to life, you will never write a competent short story.

  Edward Joseph Harrington O'Brien

  Writing, Character, Emotional

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• Women want love to be a novel, men a short story.

  Daphne du Maurier

  Women, Judging, Stories

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• A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

  David Sedaris

  Writing, Insightful, Stories

  David Sedaris (2010). “Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules”, p.13, Simon and Schuster

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• Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Writing, Keys, Story Writers

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• With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed-he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov's story, The Lady with the Dog.

  Graham Greene

  Dog, Book, Writing

  Graham Greene (1973). “Collected Stories”

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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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• All my writing-life people kept telling me that I should stop writing short stories and start writing novels: my agent, my Israeli publisher, my foreign ones, my bank manager - they all felt and keep feeling that I'm doing something wrong here.

  Etgar Keret

  Writing, People, Feelings

  "Suddenly: An Interview With Etgar Keret". Interview with Courtney Becks, www.raintaxi.com. Summer 2012.

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• I can't be reading novels when I'm writing a novel, because somebody's voice creeps in. The hardest thing to do is keep the tone and your attitude over the course of a year or however long it takes.But when I'm writing short stories, which I will be doing shortly, I can read anything I like.

  T.C. Boyle

  Attitude, Reading, Writing

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• When I started writing short stories, I thought I was writing a novel. I had like 60 or 70 pages. And what I realized was that I don't write inner monologue. I don't want to talk about what somebody is thinking or feeling. I wanted to try to show it in an interesting way. And so what I realized was that I was really writing a screenplay.

  Shane Carruth

  Writing, Thinking, Interesting

  Source: www.indiewire.com

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• I chose philosophy because it sounded like something I ought to be interested in. I didn't know anything about it, I didn't even know what it was talking about. What I really spent my time doing in those years was writing short stories. There were all sorts of interesting courses, but what I really wanted to do was make stories one way or another.

  Wes Anderson

  Philosophy, Writing, Talking

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

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• I love short stories. They're like small imploding universes. They are very tightly bound and controlled. I'd been wanting to write one for ages but just got tangled up in novels. The novel is the same in the sense that it is also a universe, but it explodes outwards with all that shrapnel going in several different directions. I don't see too much difference in the forms except for the fact that writing short stories is like sprinting rather than long-distance running.

  Colum McCann

  Short Love, Running, Distance

  Source: www.omnivoracious.com

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• I think I'm someone who can prattle on a long time about something, which serves me well as a novelist, but it's the enemy when I'm writing short stories.

  Maggie Shipstead

  Writing, Thinking, Long

  Source: therumpus.net

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• If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden. The two processes complement each other, creating a complete landscape that I treasure. The green foliage of the trees casts a pleasant shade over the earth, and the wind rustles the leaves, which are sometimes dyed a brilliant gold. Meanwhile, in the garden, buds appear on the flowers, and colorful petals attract bees and butterflies, reminding us of the subtle transition from one season to the next.

  Haruki Murakami

  Flower, Butterfly, Writing

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• I began writing early - very, very early... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.

  Wole Soyinka

  Art, Writing, School

  FaceBook post by Wole Soyinka from Jan 02, 2015

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• I think the few writers who influenced me most in writing short stories are Alice Munro and Grace Paley. They're very different, and I can't do what they do, but reading them gives me hope that I'll learn something from them.

  Nell Freudenberger

  Reading, Writing, Thinking

  "Off the Page: Nell Freudenberger". The WashingtonPost Interview, www.washingtonpost.com. December 12, 2007.

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• The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties, and I think it's how you teach yourself to write.

  Jess Walter

  Writing, Thinking, Twenties

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I've been writing short stories for twenty years now, on and off ever since I was in the creative writing program at San Francisco State University.

  Andrew Lam

  Writing, Years, San Francisco

  "‘Birds of Paradise Lost’: A Conversation With Author Andrew Lam". Interview with Anna Challet, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 5, 2013.

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• I'm used to writing short stories, which is primarily what I like to read.

  Matthew Healy

  Writing, Stories, Used

  Source: blog.superstitionreview.asu.edu

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