Quotes About Short stories

There's a couple of reasons why I write poetry more than anything else. I have written a few, what could be called short stories, something longer than flash fiction, but after about 6 pages I found that I'm desperate to figure out how to get out of what I've created. Using that many words overwhelms me and I feel like I'm drowning.

I started writing the one-sentence stories when I was translating 'Swann's Way.' There were two reasons. I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn't want to stop. And it was a reaction to Proust's very long sentences.

In judging other people's work, particularly short stories, I have noticed how novice writers tell the readers everything about their characters in the first paragraphs, disclose their motives, reveal their recent activities and their future intentions.

I think most fiction writers naturally start by writing short stories, but some of us don't. When I first started writing, I just started writing a novel. It's a hard way to learn to write. I don't recommend it to my students, but it just happens that way for some of us.

I like some of Annie Proulx, some of those very brief stories of hers. And I love J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello. I like Geoff Dyer. I also liked W. G. Sebald, especially his book 'The Emigrants'.

Jack London)"He was an adventurer and a man of action as few writers have ever been . . . the excellence of his short stories has been almost forgotten.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

I feel quite at home writing short stories but nervous and anxious when writing novels, as if the bad time of consecutive failures might arise again.

I think I'm someone who can prattle on a long time about something, which serves me well as a novelist, but it's the enemy when I'm writing short stories.

Apple of My Eye is a twisted collection of short stories by Amy Grech, including the sexy and deadly title story that makes you want to stay home with the door locked and the lights on. Grech's stories are sinister, sneaky, convoluted and dangerous—and absolutely not to be missed!" — Jonathan Maberry, Bram Stoker Award-Winning Author of Ghost Road Blues and Dead Man's Song

Suspense is very important. Even though this is humor and they're short stories, that theory of building suspense is still there.

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.

But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels.

Most publishers seem very reluctant to publish short story collections at all; they bring them out in paperback, often disguised as novels.

It took me a long time to know enough about writing to really write short stories. You can't just immerse yourself, as you do in a novel, and see where everything goes. Novels are a very flexible, accommodating form. Short stories aren't.

The many magazines, ranging from pulp to slick, that used to serve as both farm teams for writers and lures to readers, with hundreds of short stories every month, don't exist. Most of the doors for new people have been sealed.

Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.

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.

I started writing short stories. I tried writing horror, mystery, science fiction. I joined a little critique group here in town and ran my stories past them. After about three years, I tackled my first novel, Subterranean. It took me 11 months to write.

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.

I think the few writers who influenced me most in writing short stories are Alice Munro and Grace Paley. They're very different, and I can't do what they do, but reading them gives me hope that I'll learn something from them.

I've always loved short stories. Even before I was a writer, I was reading short stories - there were certain writers where I just felt like they could do in a short story what so many writers needed a whole novel to do, and that was really inspiring to me.

I feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when writing a novel, and short stories are more about instant gratification.

I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.