Top 1200 Short Story Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

I started a short story but it was so dreary that even my pen threw up.

A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.

I do think that short story writing is often a matter of luck.

The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime

The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.

I lack the skill to hold a story line for the length required for a novel or even a short story. I have never had an idea that could withstand a hundred thousand words, or even ten thousand words of rubber meeting the road.

The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.

It's so easy to call something a Jewish story or a gay story or a woman's story. Aesthetically, if a story is not universal, it has failed. Your obligation is to the story. One rule creatively, and emotionally, is its universality.

When I was in my early 20s and still at uni, I won a short-story competition: £200 was the prize.

I was a tremendous fan of the original Kenneth Grahame short story, 'The Reluctant Dragon.'

I try to use short sentences, short paragraphs and short chapters to keep the reader's interest.

My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever.

When I was eight years old, I wrote a paragraph-long short story about a goat on my mother's hundred-pound, black-and-white-screen laptop. The story came about largely because I liked the way the word 'goat' looked on the page, but I decided then and there that I wanted to be a writer. That desire never changed.

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.

In a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter.

A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.

In anything you write - in a short story, a poem - there has to be a counter-motion; it can't go all in one direction.

Wouldn't it be kinder to say that a lie is a short work of fiction? 'A story' as my daughter says?

Jean Thompson's short-story collection 'Who Do You Love' is a beautiful book, but a hell of a sad one.

A short story is one idea; a novel is a whole soup of them.

One of the last courses I taught was on the Russian short story, which I love.

In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially.

The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout.

I'm really into short-story collections and essays; they're my jam.

The short story, it's not a step on the way to becoming a novelist.

I love stories. But I don't distinguish so much between a short story and a novel. Personally, when I sit down to read a novel or a Chekhov story, I'm seeking the same thing: I'm seeking that same rich portrayal of life in words.

The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story.

Before 'Gavin & Stacey' I'd won a BBC short-story competition.

Unlike the novel, a short story may be, for all purposes, essential.

I still write the occasional short story, and poked at a novel once, but it's just not what I want to do.

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

A brief short story may require only a few paragraphs after the climax. On the other hand, in his massive novel 'The World According to Garp,' John Irving's denouement consisted of 10 separate sections, each devoted to an individual character's fate and each almost a story in itself.

I love Joy Williams, Lorrie Moore: such great short-story writers.

What you can do with a short story that you can't do with a novel is punch someone in the gut, in the best of ways.

The best way to make a long story short is to stop listening.

Short films really helped me develop as a story teller, animator, and as a director.

Iraq is short on capital, short on electricity, and short on management expertise, but it does not lack economic enthusiasm.

I didn't ask to be short. I didn't want to be short. I've tried to pretend that being a short guy didn't matter.

We like to keep it short. If a story warrants more in-depth coverage, we will do it.

There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.

I honestly would tell anyone young to start looking at stories and learning story, because I think that’s the next step after people go, ‘OK, I’ve had enough of that improvisation, I’ve had enough of those short comedy bits. Tell me a story, tell me a more complex story, something that lasts and maybe has a little more meaning to it.’ Don’t ever look at what’s happening now; look at what’s coming next.

The story is always in service to the characters, and is only as long or short, or neat or ragged as it needs to be.

A subplot is a distinguishing characteristic of the novel; the short story, for example, does not need subplots.

I wrote my first short story in third grade.

A short story is what you see when you look out of the window.

My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever

Long story short: I didn't start out thinking I'd be a tech entrepreneur.

I'm a competent novelist. I'm getting better. But I'm a really good short story writer.

To make a long story short, there's nothing like having a boss walk in.

I did playwriting, creative writing, short story, novelization.

Chekhov - shall I be blunt? - is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.

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.

Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.

A short-story collection is harder to formulate pithy sentences about.

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

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.

To write a short story, you have to be able to stay up all night.

It's only a story, you say. So it is, and the rest of life with it - creation story, love story, horror, crime, the strange story of you and I. The alphabet of my DNA shapes certain words, but the story is not told. I have to tell it myself. What is it that I have to tell myself again and again? That there is always a new beginning, a different end. I can change the story. I am the story. Begin.

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

If you're short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.