Quotes About 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.

A novel wants to befriend you, a short story almost never.

I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story.

Once in 1919, when I was traveling at night by train, I wrote a short story. In the town where the train stopped, I took the story to the publisher of the newspaper who published the story.

The short story can be hot and sweet or hot and fierce. You get it in one sitting or you don't get it. It's like a shore break. It happens quickly, and is right there in front of you, menacing you. First you're looking at the shore break, and then if you don't back up, it's on you. The novel is the long, low wave that you ride south from the Arctic Circle. It's powerful, but its power accumulates over a very long time as it rolls towards the reef.

A short story is a writer's way of thinking through experience... Journalism aims at accuracy, but fiction's aim is truth. The writer distorts reality in the interest of a larger truth.

Because Trickster is looking to stir things up, to scramble the conventions, to undo history and received notions of what is art and what is not, to sing for his supper, to find and lose himself in the act of entertaining. Trickster haunts the boundary lines, the margins, the secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore. And that is where, if it wants to renew itself in the way that the novel has done so often in its long history, the short story must, inevitably, go.

The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one.

Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling.

La novela gana siempre por puntos, mientras que el cuento debe ganar por knock-out.

The most-asked question when someone describes a novel, movie or short story to a friend probably is, 'How does it end?' Endings carry tremendous weight with readers; if they don't like the ending, chances are they'll say they didn't like the work. Failed endings are also the most common problems editors have with submitted works.

In late 2001, I contributed a short story called 'Castaways' to an anthology called 'In Laymon's Terms,' which was a tribute to Richard Laymon, who had passed away earlier that year.

I used to write things for friends. There was this girl I had a crush on, and she had a teacher she didn't like at school. I had a real crush on her, so almost every day I would write her a little short story where she would kill him in a different way.

I think most short story writers, at one time or another, over the course of several books, naturally skirt near the edge of one genre or another.

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

E. A. Poe defines a short story as readable in a single sitting. I imagine a "single sitting" was longer back in his day. But I digress again.

Novels certainly have their charms, but the most elegant creation in the prose universe is a short story.

Maya, novels certainly have their charms, but the most elegant creation in the prose universe is a short story. Master the short story and you'll have mastered the world, he thinks just before he drifts off to sleep. I should write this down, he thinks. He reaches for a pen, but there isn't one anywhere near the toilet bowl he is resting against.

The truth is, you have about three paragraphs in a short story, three pages in a novel, to capture that editor's attention enough for her to finish your story.

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

The Sonata is an essentially dramatic art form, combining the emotional range in vivid presentation of a full-size stage drama with the terseness of a short story.

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

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

Writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.