Short Story Quotes
A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters
The great thing about a short story is that it doesn't have to trawl through someone's whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.
I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.
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.
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.
A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.
I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.
While there may not be a book in every one of us, there is so often a damned good short story.
I have before suggested that a genuine blackguard is never without a pocket-handkerchief.
For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.
I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph.
The short story is the art form that deals with the individual when there is no longer a society to absorb him, and when he is compelled to exist, as it were, by his own inner light.
Somewhere around the place I've got an unfinished short story about Schrodinger's Dog; it was mostly moaning about all the attention the cat was getting.
Writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.
Short stories are designed to deliver their impact in as few pages as possible. A tremendous amount is left out, and a good short story writer learns to include only the most essential information.
San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.
Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.
My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.
I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story.
I am writing about people who are alive in the city of New York during mid-20th-century America. And these people are like a character in a play or they are figures in a short story or a novel.
When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.
A short story is a different thing all together - a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger.
Short stories consume you faster. They're connected to brevity. With the short story, you are up against mortality. I know how tough they are as a form, but they're also a total joy.
Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.
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.
In a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter.
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
You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
Short story characters, mine anyway, are usually driven by impulse, not so much by their histories and the choices that they have to make.
Within a scantily plotted, novella-style narrative (the movie is an adaptation of a short story by Tom Bissell), single shots become story events that mere mention would spoil.
I know for a fact that - it's just the way our biases work now in the industry of literature, but certainly a short story collection does not receive the same kind of attention as a novel.
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.
Like some kind of particularly tenacious vampire the short story refuses to die, and seems at this point in time to be a wonderful length for our generation.
The short story is still like the novel's wayward younger brother, we know that it's not respectable - but I think that can also add to the glory of it.
It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time.
While the novel-writer aims at an eminently natural method of transcription, the author of the short story adopts a very artificial one
The short story ... is the most democratic of all the arts; anyone may tell a story, and if it is an absorbing one someone will listen.
Readers tend to devour short stories on a newssheet, but would be disinclined to read them in collections
(The short story) is a form that has all the power of the novel - some would say more - but none of the self-importance.
Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.