Short Stories Quotes

I started out in graduate school to be a fiction writer. I thought I wanted to write short stories. I started writing poems at that point only because a friend of mine dared me to write a poem. And I took the dare because I was convinced that I couldn't write a good poem ... And then it actually wasn't so bad. ~ Natasha Trethewey

Ty is green but never with envy. Best of all, he's usually available to help move a heavy piece of furniture. ~ John Hopkins

Isn't it funny how trusting husbands are? How easily they eat the food put in front of them by their wives, without ever wondering if there might be something wrong with it.

You could mix anything in it, and they would never know. ~ Sudha Kuruganti

A year earlier my parents had moved us out of the city to a split-level on Long Island, their idea of the American dream, which meant it as now an hour-and-a-half commute via the 7:06 Hicksville to Penn Station every morning. (Dark City Lights) ~ Jonathan Santlofer

She had a new secret, the strenght of the moon, looking at her ~ Susan Engberg

Who reads short stories? one is asked, and I like to think that they are read by men and women in the dentist's office, waiting to be called to the chair; they are read on transcontinental plane trips instead of watching banal and vulgar films spin out the time between our coasts; they are read by discerning and well-informed men and women who seem to feel that narrative fiction can contribute to our understanding of one another and the sometimes bewildering world around us. ~ John Cheever

The child came to a stop beside her mother and stared up at her face as if she had never seen it before. It was the face of the new misery she felt, but on her mother it looked old and it looked as if it might have belonged to anybody, a Negro or a European or to Powell himself. The child turned her head quickly, and past the Negroe's ambling figures she could see the column of smoke rising and widening unchecked inside the granite line of trees. She stood taut, listening, and could just catch in the distance a few wild high shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had cleared for them. ~ Flannery O'Connor

The wheel turns for all, caro Chase. It's the karma effect, Giulia cried, aping Ilenia. She could have never imagined that her words would become prophetic so soon. ~ Stefania Mattana

Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash. ~ William Faulkner

I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment. ~ P.J. Harvey

It would be one hell of an addition to someone's scrapbook. (Dark City Lights) ~ Bill Bernico

As though you read my mind, you steady my head
between your hands and eye me intensely. Then your
mouth is on mine, hungry and aggressive. Your teeth
skim my lips, claiming me and I feel your tongue probing
inside of my mouth. The kiss ends as dramatically as it
began, leaving me reeling and wanting more. ~ Felicity Brandon

Heavens protect us from the dress sense of American academics. ~ Neil Gaiman

I read more than I had in years-novels, short stories, three long nonfiction books about how we had stumbled into the Iraq mess (the short answer appeared to have W for a middle initial and a dick for a Vice President). ~ Stephen King

I'd love to see more novels and short stories where the characters have their own folklore that isn't the Plot-Bearing Prophecy of Doom. ~ Marie Brennan

I worked all day in back ofa hot van snipping off dog balls, I can cut one more pair. (Dark City Lights) ~ Thomas Pluck

Zachary looked down into the swirling morass that was his beer as the man walked onto the stage and started to play a solo piece, the band respectfully allowing him to start off his set by staking his claim. Zachary would give him staking his claim. He had his guitar nestling close by his side, as always, the leather of the case gently touching his calf, sending an almost erotic charge through his body every time he moved like the less than innocent brush of a future lover's hand on a bare arm. ~ Pete Langman

Quote from my future book "Beyond the Absurd":
"Psychologists have finally proven that the entire justice system's deep motives and its idea as a whole, which have existed for thousands of years, are completely false, since they rest upon empty human delusions. Namely, the delusion that people can control or change the future and win over the evil that has already taken place. According to the studies, this is impossible, since it's the evil of the moment that makes the world go round and this is a fixed constant". ~ Alexandar Tomov

I started writing because I wanted to write scripts, but I wasn't very good at it. Then I started writing short stories, sort of as treatments for the film scripts, and I found I enjoyed writing short stories far more than I enjoyed writing film scripts. Then the short stories got longer and longer and suddenly, I had novels. ~ Jasper Fforde

Kids believe in Santa; adults believe in childhood. ~ Cate Kennedy

The Grim Reaper isn't grim at all; he's a life-saver. He isn't grim because he isn't anything ... he is nothing. And nothing is a hell of a lot better than anything. So long, boys. ~ Jack Kerouac Atop An Underwood Early Stories And Other Writings

If you're an American reader, you can love short stories the way other Americans love baseball; this is our game, people! We have more than two hundred years of know-how and knack, of creativity. ~ Amy Bloom

All short stories long. ~ Ali Smith

Obviously not a Stephen King level writer, but I'd written short stories and short fiction, from the time I was 12. ~ Mick Garris

- Excuse me gentlemen, I know it is a little disturbing, because tomorrow is the end of the world, and that man is dead, but still…he hadn't paid. Can we arrange the matter somehow? – she looks the gathered with endless anxiously and still a little angry face. ~ Alexandar Tomov

Songwriters are expanding time rather than compressing time. My short stories tend to be old fashioned, with a beginning, middle and end. ~ Steve Earle

On a far-flung parcel of government land situated somewhere in the vast reaches of parched American western desert sits an abandoned and long forgotten government facility known as Lost Cactus. That is what the shadowy agency ~ that operates there to this day ~ wants everyone from presidents on down to John Q. Public to believe. ~ John Hopkins

Short stories, for me, it's like you step inside this brand new car and you drive it and you drive it into a tree and you walk away from it. ~ Kevin Wilson

Our passing interrupted the road crossing, and the crowd bunched on both sides waited for us to go by as we all waited for the war to go by, thinking we can suspend or postpone living and not knowing that in war the heart grows older than it does in dreams ~ Dan Davin

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock. ~ William H Gass

The city was a hive from this height, the people and the yellow cabs moving about in the street below like pre-programmed insects. (Dark City Lights) ~ David Levien

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

There are two races on earth. Those who need others, who are distracted, occupied and refreshed by others, who are worried, exhausted and unnerved by solitude as by the ascension of a terrible glacier or the crossing of a desert; and those, on the other hand, who are wearied, bored, embarrassed, utterly fatigued by others, while isolation calms them, and the detachment and imaginative activity of their minds bathes them in peace. ~ Guy De Maupassant

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. ~ Jim Woodring

We're all forced to lead many lives simultaneously. We do it out of necessity, not choice. We don't make a virtue of it. ~ Ashok Ferrey

Upon returning home, she immediately donned the long, silky gloves and was immediately transported to a time of her youth, a time no one in town could ever recall, for it never occurred to anyone who knew her that she had ever been young. ~ Brooke Warra

His life had gone by without adventures, without passions, almost without hopes. The facility of dreaming, planted in every man, had never blossomed in the narrow bed of his ambitions. ~ Guy De Maupassant

Rosalind was the kind of girl who didn't have to try very hard; she just drew men like moths to a flame. A natural ash blonde with unbelievably dark blue eyes, she had a near perfect figure, always wore the trendiest gear and said exactly the right witty things.
Not like me. I'm no raving beauty by any stretch of the imagination. I've got masses of dark unruly hair which just sort-of hangs around, and I buy only clothes which suit me regardless of fashion. I wouldn't be seen dead in a mini-skirt – as I'm rather tall with long slim legs, I think I'd look like Olive Oyl. ~ Bernie Morris

For so long I have cursed this life, but in the end I can only come to accept it because I believe we all suffer from the anthology complex. We all compile these short stories that turn into fantasies. ~ M.B. Julien

Any room in our house at any time in the day was there to read in or to be read to. ~ Eudora Welty

I started writing little short stories and poems as soon as I learned to read and write. I think I was six years old. And then when I got to be eleven, twelve, and into my teens, I was just listening to records all the time, and I got a guitar. I started to take guitar lessons when I was twelve. ~ Lucinda Williams

Novels have much more space than short stories, which gives you more leeway with the number of characters you can include. Even 'furniture' characters can be described and given speaking parts to develop background or atmosphere. ~ Nancy Kress

Quote from "Unexpected Tales from the Ends of the Earth":
"The only one everlasting love is the unrealized one. The love to this thing that you'd never had. Behind it is hidden the love to your own ego and feelings". ~ Alexandar Tomov

They drove together under the stars to the lake, where they sat with fishing poles in a metal rowboat and waited for something to bite. Zack ate the toast, Uncle Orson gave some pointers, and then they cast their lines, again and again, into the pale fog. Dawn broke. The sunrise cracked. Clouds settled across the sky. The fog scattered as the air heated. And they still weren't catching anything. And that whole time, the exact same gull was circling overhead. "Nothing's happening," Zack complained. But Uncle Orson smiled at the clouds and smiled at the rowboat and smiled at the gull and smiled at the poles. "Nothing has to happen," Uncle Orson had said. ~ Matthew Baker

I'm one of those writers who started off writing novels and came to writing short stories later, partly because I didn't have the right ideas, partly because I think that short stories are more difficult. I think learning to write short stories also made me attracted toward a paring down of the novel form. ~ Julian Barnes

Let's press ahead a little further by sketching out a few variations among short shorts:

ONE THRUST OF INCIDENT. (Examples: Paz,
Mishima, Shalamov, Babel, W. C. Williams.) In these short shorts the time span is extremely brief, a few hours, maybe even a few minutes: Life is grasped in symbolic compression. One might say that these short shorts constitute epiphanies (climactic moments of high grace or realization) that have been tom out of their contexts. You have to supply the contexts yourself, since if the contexts were there, they'd no longer be short shorts.

LIFE ROLLED UP. (Examples: Tolstoy's 'Alyosha the Pot,' Verga's 'The Wolf,' D. H. Lawrence's 'A Sick Collier.') In these you get the illusion of sustained narrative, since they deal with lives over an extended period of time; but actually these lives are so compressed into typicality and paradigm, the result seems very much like a single incident. Verga's 'Wolf' cannot but repeat her passions, Tolstoy's Alyosha his passivity. Themes of obsession work especially well in this kind of short short.

SNAP-SHOT OR SINGLE FRAME. (Examples: Garda Marquez, Boll, Katherine Anne Porter.) In these we have no depicted event or incident, only an interior monologue or flow of memory. A voice speaks, as it were, into the air. A mind is revealed in cross-section - and the cut is rapid. One would guess that this is the hardest kind of short short to write: There are many pitfalls such as tiresome ~ Irving Howe

All stories are the sin of their weaver. ~ Miyuki Miyabe

The wisdom in publishing is that short-story collections don't sell. All too often short-story collections are viewed as vanity projects or are published by small presses, are not seen as real in the way that novels are real. Still, for me, the short stories are the places where I get to fly, to experiment, to play. I ~ Neil Gaiman

A shrink and a patient switching places. Who is REALLY the boss? ~ Mary Papas

One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, "As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect ... " When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn't know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Perhaps she moves too slowly now, or the world moves too fast for her. She enters the lift, a giant wheel turns and steel cables lower the mechanized box. The lift drops down a black shaft, which exists at the heart of each HDB block. The country may be described, not as a place covered with blocks of public housing, but a topography where black vertical shafts, some forty storeys tall, rise out of the ground like trees. ~ Justin Ker

Most of my short stories are fantasy. ~ Ray Bradbury

Lost Cactus is simply an urban myth. ~ John Hopkins

Yes, we could talk to you for days on end about all the bad first dates. Those are stories. Funny stories. Awkward stories. Stories we love to share, because by sharing them, we get something out of the hour or two we wasted on the wrong person. But that's all bad first dates are: short stories. Good first dates are more than short stories. They are first chapters. On a good first date, everything is springtime.
And when a good first date becomes a relationship, the springtime lingers. Even after it's over, there can be springtime. ~ David Levithan

Gabrielle chuckled, her dark eyes twinkling. "So he's been after you, has he? Poor Etta, pursued by a sun priest offering to pleasure - "
"Every nook and cranny," Marietta interrupted dryly and Gabrielle tipped her head back with a throaty laugh. ~ Michelle O'Leary

Poetry, fiction as novels or short stories - these are autonomous as created by their authors. They should stand on their own, like pieces of furniture that should be judged as to their usefulness, elegance. ~ F. Sionil Jose

The task ahead of you is never as great as the power within you. ~ Fran 'Mystiblu' Hafey

Scrivener is where I live. I'm planning the next novel, two screenplays and a couple of short stories with it and it's amazing how fluid the software makes the process. I genuinely think this is the biggest software advance for writers since the word processor. ~ Michael Marshall Smith

I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories - I love the short story. ~ George R R Martin

The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, Death in the Afternoon - as well as all of the short stories that writers studied for the inner trick of them. But there was no trickery: only the plain words put there as if they had always been there - like pebbles cooled in a river. ~ Naomi Wood

Even when she was alive, Esther Kreitman's novels, short stories and translations received far less attention than the work of her famous brothers, I. J. and Isaac Bashevis Singer. ~ Clive Sinclair

Quote from "FUTURE GONE":
" ... I set the house on fire. It's dark outside. The fire tears down the darkness. I turn my back to the place and leave, not knowing where.
And suddenly I understand ...
All dreams are dead now". ~ Alexandar Tomov

The best short stories and the most successful jokes have a lot in common. Each form relies on suggestion and economy. Characters have to be drawn in a few deft strokes. There's generally a setup, a reveal, a reversal, and a release. ~ Geraldine Brooks

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

Wafa Wanaka, our elders say. Not only does this mean that death is the ultimate peace, it also means that we are not to speak ill of the dead. Once a person has crossed over to the real of the spirits, he takes his transgressions with him, and we speak only of the good. - 'Something Nice from London ~ Petina Gappah

If I'd learned nothing else in my twenty-seven years on this planet, I'd learned that when someone gives you something totally unexpected and undeserved, you don't ask questions. ~ Jill D. Block

Sail the main course in a simple sturdy craft. Keep her well stocked with short stories and long laughs. Go fast enough to get there but slow enough to see. Moderation seems to be the key. ~ Jimmy Buffett

I write short stories. They may appear big in size, but when you consider it, they're four or five novels in one ... In return for picking up one of my books, I'm trying to give them value for their money ... the goal of writing any book is to create the illusion that what you are reading is reality and you're part of it. ~ James Clavell

Many of my better short stories are just the last chapters of novels I did not write. ~ Roger Zelazny

Who would have thought God would send a bad man and a sheriff just to save Prince? ~ Debra Holland

I love short stories - reading and writing them. The best short stories distill all the potency of a novel into a small but heady draught. They are perfect reading material for the bus or train or for a lunchtime break. Everything extraneous has been strained off by the author. The best short stories pack the heft of any novel, yet resonate like poetry. ~ Ian Rankin

I had a lot of expectations placed on me because I was already having some success with my short stories. That was not a good situation to be in. That by itself took a long time to overcome. ~ Jess Row

Others, amounting to four novels and a mess of short stories which I did not think worth preserving, I have done my best to eliminate from the record by refusing all requests for permission to reprint them, and I hope I have done a good job of making them hard to unearth. ~ Leslie Charteris

Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories. ~ Paul Theroux

I write short stories when a little idea occurs to me, that I know isn't a part of a novel that will stand by itself and should be concentrated. ~ Roddy Doyle

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

When I started out in the early 1930s, there were a great many magazines that published short stories. Unfortunately, the short-story market has dwindled to almost nothing. ~ Irwin Shaw

Poems are surmountable. They have rhymes and rhythms to help you make meaning. They're short enough. . . to read and reread until you've made some sense of them. Short stories are a different ballgame. You read them and understand the words completely. You know what happens in each sentence. You follow the dialogue and action. at the end, you know exactly what's happened. And also you have no idea. ~ Laurie Frankel

I usually have about four books on the go - a bedside book, a lavatory book, a downstairs book, and the book in my study that I read sneakily while I should be writing. Short stories for the lavatory, obviously. ~ Mal Peet

The exhausted earth groaned and quivered under the monotonous glare of the sun. Spirals of heat rose from the ground as if from molten lava. A panting lizard crawled painfully over the fevered rock in search of a shady crevice. Cattle and dogs cringed under the scanty shade of the trees and waited for the rain to deliver them from the heat and thirst. Instead the heat grew more intense and oppressive each day, singeing and stifling all living things with an invisible sheet of fire, which only the rain could put out.

The drought had persisted for over a month. ~ S. Rajaratnam

When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

I picked up my volume of Collected Stories and Poems by Edgar Allen Poe. I sprawled across the bed and flipped through the pages until I came to one of my favorite short stories: "The Oval Portrait. ~ Crystal Smith Gordon

You want to hear an agent scream, say, 'I'm thinking about doing a collection of short stories set in the Ozarks.' ~ Daniel Woodrell

Some people become an integral part of our lives; others are ships that pass in the night. Short stories, in fact. My ~ Ruskin Bond

There's an immense dramatic possibility in describing that universe. The books, for me, were an enormous relief in that sense of how they were written to allow primary emotion, elemental emotion, to matter enormously but to give the thing an extraordinary flow so you don't notice at what point that you're actually overwhelmed by this. There's no showiness, at all. It's the opposite of showiness. I think, if it was a painting, it could be very grey abstract, almost, with some lines and very, very beautiful. But you wouldn't have a notion of where the beauty was.
(Talking about the short stories of Alistair MacLeod, who he discovered while working on The Modern Library.) ~ Colm Toibin

Though my short stories are the more readable, my novels do have more to say; and they will, if anyone has the patience for it, repay a rereading. ~ R.A. Lafferty

The times have changed and now the story is old, but yet it all remains the same, a victim in the cold. ~ Stephen Harker

I think of myself as a writer who photographs. Images, for me, can be considered poems, short stories or essays. And I've always thought the best place for my photographs was inside books of my own creation. ~ Sam Abell

You are sweet and smart and definitely not extremely strange. You are lovable and deserving of love--everybody is. ~ Kimberly King Parsons

Although your marrows look very good, it's not them I'm interested in.. (The Honesty Box) Love Potion ~ Samantha Bacchus

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. ~ Ray Bradbury

I wanted to be a writer, but at the time, I spent my days working a retail job, my nights sleeping in my childhood bedroom, and while I had written short stories here and there, I didn't know how to write good fiction anymore than I knew how to perform good brain surgery. ~ Anthony Marra

At the height of the Cultural Revolution, rather than risk having to face dire consequences for his accumulated writings, he burned several kilos of manuscripts (ten plays, and many short stories, poems, and essays). For him it was an ordeal to part with what he had written. Moreover, it took a long time to burn so much paper without creating smoke and arousing suspicions. ~ Gao Xingjian

I read your diary. I KNOW. ~ Mary Papas

Just let me catch my breath, Red Macalister, and think. You've tipped my teapot handle over spout. ~ Debra Holland

Look Jane!" Brenda nudged her daughter. "Look who's over there!"
"Damn!" Jane had smudged the fingernail she'd been painting. A tiny frown of exasperation marred her pretty face. Then she brightened as she saw him – Richard from accounts, jostling at the bar with the rest of the lunchtime crowd. "What's he doing here?" she wondered aloud. "Wouldn't have thought this was his scene."
"Don't be silly!" Brenda admonished. "It's a hot day. Lots of people fancy a cold lager with their lunch. It's perfectly natural." She sometimes despaired at her daughter's lack of insight. How could such a pretty girl be so empty-headed? And when would Jane ever find a steady boyfriend? Brenda had high hopes for Richard in this direction. He was old enough to be a good influence; brilliantly clever; in line for promotion – he would be perfect for Jane.
"Call him over, Mum!" Jane suggested excitedly. ~ Bernie Morris

Around 1980, I'd been writing short stories, all to no success; so I wrote a fan letter to Stephen King and asked "How long should it take an aspiring writer to either get published or know when to give up?" Lo and behold, King wrote back to me in long hand with blue flair pen on 14-inch paper, purveying a very nice, helpful note; in it he said my letter proved a "command of the language," that I should never give up, and that it would take years to succeed, not months. "That's cold comfort but it's the truth." This was the ultimate encouragement for a young writer to be who didn't know shit about the market. I took Mr. King's advice and actually sold my first novel little more than a year later. I'll always be copiously grateful for this advice, and it's the same advice I give aspiring writers now (along with the story of King's reply!). ~ Edward Lee

I've been asking you to marry me since we met! What more do you want? ~ Chayada Welljaipet

I was also a good writer, by the way. My, you know, my English teacher and writing teacher loved my writing. You know, I wrote short stories and things like that. And they liked them very much. ~ Robert Barry

She looked at me like I was stupid, the same look the girls in JC used to give me when I hadn't heard of the latest boy band, or turned up at Zouk wearing unfashionable clothes. ~ Jeremy Tiang