Story Writers Quotes

A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.

To survive, you must tell stories.

Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

In writing a series of stories about the same characters, plan the whole series in advance in some detail, to avoid contradictions and inconsistencies.

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

I love the necessary ambiguity of short stories - there simply isn't time to render every detail, so much of the story that orbits the literal prose must happen in the reader's imagination. Who knows, maybe the dwindling attention spans means a lucrative future for short story writers.

Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.

Short stories are designed to deliver their impact in as few pages as possible. A tremendous amount is left out, and a good short story writer learns to include only the most essential information.

You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.

To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.

Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story.

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.

The short-story writer knows that he can't proceed cumulatively, that time is not his ally. His only solution is to work vertically, heading up or down in literary space.

In a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter.

Chekhov - shall I be blunt? - is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.

The more original a short-story writer, the odder looking the assortment of things he or she puts together for a story.

My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever

I didn't intend to become a short-story writer. I became one because I finished a couple of short stories and realized that's what I wanted to do and could do with children and with all the other things in my life.

So it happened at last: I was about to become a thief, a cheap milk-stealer. Here was your lash-in-the-pen genius, your one story-writer: a thief.

Los Angeles is a Yukon for crime-story writers.

Hackle may be the best absurdist story writer working today.

Tom Kealey might be my favorite short story writer and this astonishing collection is long overdue.

For a short-story writer, a story is the combination of what the writer supposed the story would likely be about - plus what actually turned up in the course of writing.