Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I wrote 'The Hate U Give' as a short story while I was in college at a mostly white school in conservative Mississippi.
Some writers keep a tighter rein on that than others. For short story collections I'm definitely in the loose-rein camp.
The book that first made me want to be a writer is Flannery O'Connor's short story collection 'A Good Man Is Hard To Find.'
I love film and, particularly, shorts. You don't get to see them often, and they're a great little form, like a short story.
A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine.
I cannot write a novel because I cannot work in continuity. My works are more abstract, may be, I will try short story writing.
My favorite books to give or get are short story collections. And always paperbacks because they are easy to carry as you travel.
I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story.
I do remember dancing in my living room when my short story 'The Laughing Man Meets Little Cat' won a Chizine fiction contest in 2002.
When I started the 'Broken Empire' trilogy, I thought it was a short story, and I didn't know the beginning, middle, or end of even that.
Originally, 'The Windup Girl' started as a short story - a very gnarly, complicated short story set in Bangkok that didn't work very well.
The great thing about a short story is that it doesn't have to trawl through someone's whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.
Most publishers seem very reluctant to publish short story collections at all; they bring them out in paperback, often disguised as novels.
I wrote a novel in my early twenties; I won a high school prize - my short story got published, and I got 50 dollars, which was a huge deal.
In general, short stories are less read than before, they're less published than before and, not surprisingly, they're less taught than before.
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.
All of my problems are rather complicated - I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It's like a personal therapy.
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.
I had never written anything before in my life except maybe in high school when I wrote a short story, and my mother had to put an ending on that.
You could omit anything if you knew that the omitted part would strengthen the short story and make people feel something more than they understood
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.'
I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.
There are fewer established rules in the way you tell a story for commercials than in features. It's a great little short story you get to play with.
We were living in Denver, Colorado, and I was teaching high school. I asked the kids to write a short story, so I thought I should write some myself.
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.
A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.
The short story is still like the novel's wayward younger brother, we know that it's not respectable - but I think that can also add to the glory of it.
Certain of Poe's tales possess an almost absolute perfection of artistic form which makes them veritable beacon-lights in the province of the short story.
I got a couple of stories published, but the kind of money you were making for publishing a short story, I could see I wasn't going to make a living at it.
When I'm working on a short story, I could duck into a bathroom at a crowded party and write a scene, which is to say I can work in a very incremental way.
Like some kind of particularly tenacious vampire the short story refuses to die, and seems at this point in time to be a wonderful length for our generation.
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.
The short story can't really hold an interesting event. It can't hold a death or a war or a loss of great magnitude the way either a long story or a novel can.
After 'A Suitable Boy,' I didn't write anything, not even a short story. I thought to myself: 'I ought to start writing.' But I can never force myself to write.
I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph.
I want the reader to feel something is astonishing - not the 'what happens' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.
In a film, you only have a finite amount of time, and you're so concerned with saying what happened and making it a gripping short story with a satisfying ending.
The cool thing about reading is that when you read a short story or you read something that takes your mind and expands where your thoughts can go, that's powerful.
I've written some short stories about my personal experience, but it's not something you can use everywhere. Every novel, every work of fiction, needs its own food.
A short story can be packed with meaning and impact, with the concentrated density of a collapsed star, but should preferably also have a kind of elegant simplicity.
Novels are my favorite to write and read. I do like writing personal essays, too. I'm not really a short story writer, nor do I tend to gravitate to them as a reader.
The hardest thing about writing a script is you finish it, but it doesn't mean anything. It's not like a novel or short story - a script is meant to be made into a movie.
A typical twenty-page short story would work quite well as a graphic novel. A single graphic novel of maybe 120 pages would condense down into a short story quite nicely.
Novels are so much unrulier and more stressful to write. A short story can last two pages and then it's over, and that's kind of a relief. I really like balancing the two.
I really do believe some people are naturally novelists and some people are short story writers. For me, when I was in middle school or high school, I started with novels.
I would recommend the short story form, which is a lot harder to write since you have to be so careful with words, until there is plenty of time to doodle through a novel.
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.
I once dreamed a whole short story. Wrapped in its peculiar atmosphere, as if draped in clouds, I walked entranced to my desk at about 4 A.M. and typed it on to the screen.
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.