Top 1200 Short Story Quotes & Sayings - Page 4

I wrote 'The Hate U Give' as a short story while I was in college at a mostly white school in conservative Mississippi.

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.

From my anger, frustration, and hurt, I wrote the short story that would later become 'The Hate U Give.'

I don't revise a lot when writing short stories. As far as the novel, I definitely thought more about plot. Honestly, I'm still pretty confused about what "plot" means. I've been reading some of my Goodreads reviews and one reader noted that the The Last Days of California "reads like a short story stretched to the breaking point, padded and brought into novel range..." I don't know what people want, really.

The short story form allows evocation, suggestion, implication. Its potency often lies in what it does not say.

The novel [The Kite Runner] came about as an expansion of that original, unpublished short story.

I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story.

A love affair is like a short story--it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and well knit with that element of revelatory surprise as a well-written story should be, it usually dissipated in a succession of messy and humiliating anticlimaxes.

What the short story needs above all is for one of the big publishers to get an equivalent series up and running and to support it and promote it.

My favorite books to give or get are short story collections. And always paperbacks because they are easy to carry as you travel.

The short story is very good at looking at shadow psychologies and how the system breaks down underneath.

Jesus was short on sermons, long on conversations; short on answers, long on questions; short on abstraction and propositions, long on stories and parables; short on telling you what to think, long on challenging you to think for yourself.

Could we say that the short short is to other kinds of fiction somewhat as the lyric is to other kinds of poetry? The lyric does not seek meaning through extension, it accepts the enigmas of confinement. It strives for a rapid unity of impression, an experience rendered in its wink of immediacy. And so too with the short short.

A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine

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.

Tom Kealey might be my favorite short story writer and this astonishing collection is long overdue.

I think that when I'm telling a story, I'm doing the best I can to tell the story as fully as I can, and if there are various fractures that happen in the story, then that's just the very thing that the story is as opposed to my looking for avenues of difference in one story. They just really do exist. For me, anyway.

A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.

I love film and, particularly, shorts. You don't get to see them often, and they're a great little form, like a short story.

Having judged a few competitions, it's clear that novelists are often the laziest short story writers.

(The short story) is a form that has all the power of the novel - some would say more - but none of the self-importance.

A central task for any campaign is to develop a narrative: a short, simple story explaining where we are, how we got here and where we need to go.

I found myself sitting at the computer, and I thought I was going to write a kind of simple nostalgic story about two boys and their love of kite fighting. But stories have a will of their own, and this one turned out to be this dark tale about betrayal, loss, regret. The short story which was about 25 pages long sat around for a couple of years.

When my oldest brother started acting. From there, I wanted to act myself. That's the long story short.

I wrote my first short story for a competition and won second prize. Another competition came up and I won first prize. The first story was published in a newspaper. The second went out on radio.

Have a short story feature two situations, and then let them solve each other.

When I started the 'Broken Empire' trilogy, I thought it was a short story, and I didn't know the beginning, middle, or end of even that.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

people who say its a long story, mean it's a stupid short one that they are too embarrassed and couldn't be bothered to tell

A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine.

Short story characters, mine anyway, are usually driven by impulse, not so much by their histories and the choices that they have to make.

I like to envision the creation of a short story collection as being like putting together a jazz album. Yes, there's logic and literary structures imposed by me, but at the same time, all the tracks are shaped and ordered in a much more improvisational manner. The guiding principle for me is whether or not a story adds a layer or texture to the overall collection.

You know, it's sort of common wisdom among New York publishers that short story collections don't make money.

Works of art are not so much finished as abandoned. Perhaps poems can be perfect. A short-short story might even be perfectible, as effective and enjoyable for one reader as the next. But novels and other book-length narratives are great rambling things that always contain some flaws. For works of any length, there comes a point when your continued tinkering won't improve the whole, but will just trade one set of problems for another.

The literature now is so opaque to the average person that you couldn't take a science-fiction short story that's published now and turn it into a movie. There'd be way too much ground work you'd have to lay. It's OK to have detail and density, but if you rely on being a lifelong science-fiction fan to understand what the story is about, then it's not going to translate to a broader audience.

And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world.

A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.

All of my short films are about marriages, and I think that this probably comes from some kind of unconscious fascination with my parents' story and what they went through.

'The Master and Margarita' is deeply to do with the unconscious. It is a story about a man who writes a story in a time when he's not supposed to write that story: the story of Pontius Pilate.

I'm very happy - if I can do even a little bit of work to get the short story out more, I'm thrilled.

Courier 12 is the Type-O blood of fonts - works just as good for a 'N.Y. Times' op-ed as a screenplay or a short story.

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 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.

While there may not be a book in every one of us, there is so often a damned good short story.

A short story is the shortest distance between two points; a novel is the scenic route.

I'm not short," Daisy muttered. "Short women are never mysterious, or elegant, or pursued by handsome men. And they're always treated like children. I refuse to be short.

The Universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the Universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the Universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything.

Today, Angelina Jolie met with Pope Francis at the Vatican. Long story short: She adopted him.

The Work always leaves you with less of a story. Who would you be without your story? You never know until you inquire. There is no story that is you or that leads to you. Every story leads away from you. Turn it around; undo it. You are what exists before all stories. You are what remains when the story is understood.

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

The Bible tells a story. A story that isn’t over. A story that is still being told. A story that we have a part to play in.

The fabliau, then, is a short story that is a tall story. It combines a burly blurting of dirty words with a reveling in humiliations that are good unclean fun. A popular venture that is keen to paste—épater—everybody (not just the bourgeoisie), it is the art of the single entendre. Highly staged low life, it guffaws at the pious, the prudish, and the priggish. High cockalorum versus high decorum…. The introduction here, like the translator’s note, tells well the story of the comic tales, anonymous for the most part, usually two or three hundred lines long, of which about 160 exist.

I don't think I was anything short of ecstatic when I found out 'It's Kind of a Funny Story' would be premiering in Toronto.

'Monkeys' is made up of nine short stories that tell an overall story. 'Folly' is a series of vignettes all put together to tell a larger story. In 'Lust and Other Stories,' there are nine stories - three, three, three; the beginnings of love, the middles, and the afters.

I think that people have to have a story. When you tell a story, most people are not good storytellers because they think it's about them. You have to make your story, whatever story it is you're telling, their story. So you have to get good at telling a story so they can identify themselves in your story.

I usually grow sick of my short-story characters and think, 'I never want to see you again.'

I've never been a true fan of the short story and have only published a single example of my own.

I couldn't sit down and write a novel or a short story - even now - because of my dyslexia. But I learned narration through movies.

A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once.

For me, the short story is the depth of a novel, the breadth of a poem, and, as you come to the last few paragraphs, the experience of surprise.