Quotes About Short story

I think book adaptations, the best one to me is like 'Brokeback Mountain.' Which is a short story, 21 pages, that expands so beautifully into a movie.

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.

I can't stand the short story form, which, after all, is a magazine form.

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

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

A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don't run out of energy (or in the case of the novelist-- ideas) because they have so far to run. To mix the metaphor, writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.

I've waited for a novel from Charles Yu with eager anticipation since being bowled over by his 2006 short story collection, 'Third Class Superhero.'

While there is some disagreement over the official length of a short story, a good rule of thumb is that it is between 1k and 7k words. Less than that and you get into the area of flash fiction. More than that and you move into the territory of the novelette (7k -20k) or the novella (20k-50k).

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.

I'd always intended to make 'Far North' straight after 'The Warrior.' We had the rights to the short story, the script was in development, and I knew where I wanted to shoot it. It just took a long time getting the script together and raising the finance.

It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.

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.

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

I never believed me mam when she finished a story with 'And they all lived happily ever after'. 'No, they didn't. I don't believe it,' I'd say. I prefered Humpty Dumpty – nice and short, and a realistic ending. He never hurt anyone, but he had a little accident and died. Shit happens. That's life, innit.

A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters

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.

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

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.

I have a musical called Goodbye and Good Luck, based on a Grace Paley short story. I also have King Island Christmas, and there are 20 different productions of it this year.

San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.

I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.

I've never written poetry. I'm not a poet, but I think the nearest you get is either the short story or the novella, in that you can't waste a word. There is no hiding place: everything's got to be seen to relate, and the prose counts.

What greatly annoys me is sometimes you see the short story being described as a training ground for the novel. Kind of like an apprenticeship. And in lots of ways, it's a far harder form.

Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand; a short story is a romance, a relationship; a novel is a marriage-one has to be cunning, devise compromises, and make sacrifices.