Top 1200 Short Stories Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

I only published my first novel at the age of 40. Till then, I wrote short stories.

I am also working on a couple of short stories for anthologies. This is new to me and I'm enjoying it.

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.

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.

I'm much more drawn to fiction, to short stories, and to plays, than I am to diarists.

Eventually, I just want to write wavy little short stories.

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.

Stories--individual stories, family stories, national stories--are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.

I used to publish these stories in 32-page comics, and I would either do short stories or break the long ones up into chunks so there would be some variety inside the comic. But since then, people have been doing more and more long, standalone works, and the term 'graphic novel' has sort of become the codified term now.

Long fiction is wonderful and you can lose yourself in it as a reader and as a writer, but short stories don't allow the same kind of immersion. Often the best stories hold you back and make you witness them. This may be one of the reasons some people reject the form. That and the fact that they are harder work to read. A story will not let you get comfortable and settle in. It is like a stool that is so small that you must always be aware of sitting.

When you want to say something very important, tell it with a short sentence! There is no time for long stories!

It's tricky to take a book of short stories and turn it into a feature film.

I think because I write so many short stories, it's not that hard to come up with characters that are not me.

I know now why I stopped writing short stories. It was at the point when I recognised how difficult they were.

Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories.

My favorite short stories are by Alice Munro, especially her collections 'Carried Away' and 'Runaway.'

The short stories tend to be a journalistic gathering of anecdotes that are put together to make something larger.

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

I kept writing short stories and sending out my manuscript, and it kept coming back like a bad penny. It was rejected all over town, quite often in very complimentary terms, but rejected nonetheless. Agents would return it saying that they loved it but didn't think they could sell it, or they would ask if I could change the collection into linked stories.

The great pleasure for me in writing short stories is the fierce, elegant challenge.

I am also working on a couple of short stories for anthologies. This is new to me and Im enjoying it.

I'm interested in Native American and African American stories, and LGBTQ stories and stories of persons of mixed heritage. These are the stories I want to see onscreen and on the pages.

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

I wrote short stories when I was a teenager, but they weren't any good and I kinda knew it.

I would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them.

Most people, they get overwhelmed by the religious stories, the nationalist stories, by the economic stories of the day, and take these stories to be the reality.

Your biggest influences are the earliest ones. When I was young, I was very influenced by the short stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

These short stories are vast structures existing mostly in the subconscious of our cultural history. They will live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That's because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs. A good short story asks a question that can't be answered in simple terms. And even if we come up with some understanding, years later, while glancing out of a window, the story still has the potential to return, to alter right there in our mind and change everything.

Sometimes ... the short short appears to rest on nothing more than a fragile anecdote which the writer has managed to drape with a quantity of suggestion. A single incident, a mere anecdote - these form the spine of the short short.

So I found myself telling my own stories. It was strange: as I did it I realised how much we get shaped by our stories. It's like the stories of our lives make us the people we are. If someone had no stories, they wouldn't be human, wouldn't exist. And if my stories had been different I wouldn't be the person I am.

I actually think that short stories transfer to film much better than novels do.

I've been into short stories ever since I read an Angela Carter collection when I was a teenager.

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.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

I was writing short stories aged seven or eight. I had a vivid, overactive imagination.

I like to read Bengali novels and short stories. I am not that fond of reading English books, as I don't have a connect with it.

I mostly write short stories. They are best written in a continuous creative process. You have a feel of immediacy.

I'm very interested in writing - it just takes so much discipline, whether it's short stories or novels.

With short stories, you can always see the whole, but it's just so hard to get everything you want into that small form.

I like the eclipses, the synaptic jumps of short stories. The reader has to participate very actively in the experience.

Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.

Considering that "literary fiction" is a sub-genre that's not quite the same as "literature," either, it follows that the short, semi-humorous bits posted online for all to see are something absolutely other, uniquely themselves compared to canonical short stories, for example, and so it'd probably be best to call it something other than "online lit" since I honestly think very little of it can compare to so-called "literature."

I feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when writing a novel, and short stories are more about instant gratification.

I decided to write short stories because they got rejected quicker.

I went to classes on writing for film and theatre as well as short stories at Stanford.

Short stories are not maybe the biggest deal in our culture anymore.

With both novels and short stories, I think a lot in terms of character arcs, when it comes to endings.

There's a joy in writing short stories, a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off.

I was well traveled, and I created this illusion of literacy through reading and writing. I wrote a book of short stories.

Our old stories happen to be your new stories. The stories that you're seeing as immigrant stories are your grandparents' stories, are your great-grandparents' stories. You just happen to be separated from them a little bit.

I think that writers have natural canvases, and my canvas, even in short stories, often seems to be the scope of a life.

Readers tend to devour short stories on a newssheet, but would be disinclined to read them in collections

There are a lot of college writing textbooks that will include essays and short stories, and after reading the story or essay, there will be questions such as "Have YOU Had any experience with a pedophile in YOUR family?" or "When was the last time you saw YOUR mother drunk?" and they're just really good at prompting stories. You answer the question, and sometimes that can spring into a story.

I want to write a script, but before that, I am planning to compile a book of short stories.

My favorite author is Anton Chekhov, not so much for the plays but for his short stories, and I think he was really my tutor.

I'm going to marry my novels and have little short stories for children.

I didn't really start to write until I was almost 30, and I started with the short stories.

Robert Louis Stevenson... I'm focusing on the late short stories that I was ignorant of. I always thought he was a boys' author, but he's not at all.

If you look at my last songs and first short stories, there is a real connection between them.

I have written about 240 books and some short stories, too. It's taken me many years.