A Quote by Raymond Carver

My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.

Raymond Carver

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Circumstances Distraction Form Permanent Responsibility Short Short Story Story

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Raymond Carver
American - Writer
May 25, 1938 - August 2, 1988

A form wherein we can enjoy simultaneously what is best in both the novel and the short story form. My plan was to create a book that affords readers some of the novel's long-form pleasures but that also contains the short story's ability to capture what is so difficult about being human - the brevity of our moments, their cruel irrevocability.

Junot Diaz

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.

Tobias Wolff

The events of life have never fallen into the form of the short story or the form of the poem, or into any other form.Yourown consciousnessisthe only formyouneed.

William Saroyan

I can't stand the short story form, which, after all, is a magazine form.

Jim Harrison

I decided to make myself a little less precious with my storytelling. I think you can see from the first three pieces in the book that I have a long term relationship with the short story as a form and I really love an elegantly crafted story that has several elements that come together in a way that is emotionally complex and different from when we started. That kind of crystalline, perfect, idealized thing that the short story as a genre has come to represent.

Lucy Corin

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.

Ali Smith

In March of 2001, I revisited the short story, and found that thought it did not work well as a short story, it might work much better as a longer one. The novel [The Kite Runner] came about as an expansion of that original, unpublished short story.

Khaled Hosseini

I often think of the novel as a form that celebrates social groups, and the short story being a form that is capable of celebrating an individual or a sort of insular little pair of people.

Antonya Nelson

My [story] outlines are usually about 5-6 pages long. I'm essentially telling myself the story in short form. I try to make it clear who the major characters are, what they want, and what obstacles they face.

Chevy Stevens

I regret that there aren't more short stories in other magazines. But in a certain way, I think the disappearance of the short-story template from everyone's head can be freeing. Partly because there's no mass market for stories, the form is up for grabs. It can be many, many things. So the anthology is very much intended for students, but I think we're all in the position of writing students now. Very few people are going around with a day-to-day engagement with the short story.

Lorin Stein

I guess the freedom - poetic freedom - because the poetic part of short story form is an attempt to say something that's unsayable about one's incarcerated existence, and it's fun to come up with words to represent that condition, and it's fun to pull the tail of absurdity and rile it up, where you giggle at what you do or you get enthralled and in the short story.

Hampton Fancher

The "How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others" essay was so hard to write because of the memories, the sensory stuff, but also because it didn't follow the form of any essay that I've ever read. And the truth that I was exploring necessitated that obliteration of traditional form, I think.

Kiese Laymon

I always wanted to do a story on the blues that not only reflected its nature and its content, but also alludes to the form itself…In short, a story that gives you the impression of the blues.

Charles Burnett

Make the short story tremendously succinct - with a very short pulse or rhythm - and the closest selection of detail - in other words summarise intensely and deeply and keep down the lateral development. It should be a little gem of bright, quick, vivid form

Henry James

The short story, on the other hand, is the perfect American form.

Tobias Wolff

To change your circumstances, first start thinking differently. Do not passively accept unsatisfactory circumstances, but form a picture in your mind of circumstances as they should be. Believe and succeed.

Norman Vincent Peale

A Quote by Raymond Carver

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