A Quote by Kevin Barry

I was writing fiction in my 20s but in a pretty undisciplined way - late at night, maybe, after I'd peeled myself from the walls of a nightclub and crawled home along the gutters. But I slowly became more serious and more devout in my work, and I fell seriously in love with the short story form.

Kevin Barry

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After Along Became Devout Fell Fiction Form Gutters Home Late Love Maybe More Myself Night Nightclub Pretty Serious Seriously Short Short Story Slowly Story Undisciplined Walls Way Work Writing Writing Fiction

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Kevin Barry
Irish - Author
Born: 1969

I started seriously applying myself to writing fiction immediately after I finished graduate school. By 'seriously,' I mean that, instead of noodling along on a story, finishing it or not as the mood struck me, I set out to complete what I started, to polish it to the best of my ability, and to send out the finished story.

Jane Lindskold

I like to work from home. I do most of my writing in bed, late at night after everyone has gone to sleep. I need to be alone with my thoughts, and late at night is about the only time that can actually happen.

Donald Driver

I once fell 20 feet from a tree, was knocked unconscious, and when I picked myself up and straggled home, my parents thought I was making it up. However, when my brother and I fabricated a story about an encounter with a bear, they believed that! So maybe I learned very early on that fiction was more interesting to listeners!

Sharon Creech

Short fiction isn't my natural form. It's taken a lot of work over the years to finally feel more comfortable writing stories under 80,000 words!

Kameron Hurley

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don't obey the rules of progression for novels. I don't think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let's say a chunk of fiction.

Alice Munro

I'm terrified of writing at night, for then I can't sleep. So I start slowly, slowly writing in the morning and go on into the late afternoon.

Italo Calvino

My writing became more and more minimalist. In the end, I couldn't write at all. For seven or eight years, I hardly wrote. But then I had a revelation. What if I did the opposite? What if, when a sentence or a scene was bad, I expanded it, and poured in more and more? After I started to do that, I became free in my writing.

Karl Ove Knausgard

A couple of pieces of advice for the kids who are serious about writing are: first of all, to read everything you can get your hands on so you can become familiar with different forms of writing: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, journalism. That's very important. And also keep a journal. Not so much, because it's good writing practice. Although it is, but more because it's a wonderful source of story starters.

Ann M. Martin

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

When I first started writing, I did mostly short fiction, and I'd work on a short story and get near to being done and have no idea what I'd work on next, and then I'd panic.

Ann Leckie

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

Penelope Lively

Maybe I don't take myself quite as seriously as I used to, but the work has gotten better and more interesting, and I'm just having more fun. It's getting more and more fun with each role.

William Sadler

I haven't written a word of fiction since 2009. I have no desire to write fiction. I did what I did and it's done. There's more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date.

Philip Roth

I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.

Bruce Coville

I began as a poet, moved to short fiction, then to novel writing, and, for the past twelve years, back to stories. I sometimes wonder if the pendulum will swing all the way back to where I began. As T.S. Eliot says, "In my end is my beginning," but for now I'm staying put, sitting tight, and loving the short story form way too much to leave it quite yet.

Jack Driscoll

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

A Quote by Kevin Barry

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