Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
I study everything that I do to become better all the time at my craft. The beauty for me about being an artist is that the dream will never die because I'm not obsessed with material things and don't care about the money and don't care about the attention of the public but only the love of my fans. For me it's about keeping the dream alive of how much more devoted, how much more honest, how much better of an artist can I become? That's the only fear that I ever have, that the dream will die.
