Make it interesting and it will be true: this is what…

Before World War II, I was living a very cloistered existence, as most cartoonists do. The work I was pouring out did not come…

— Will Eisner

Poetry died as a commercial form and then it died as a serious art form. No one serious touches it. It used to be…

— William Monahan

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.

— W. Somerset Maugham

“I'd like to give these detective story writers a course of routine work. They'd soon learn how most things are untraceable and nobody ever…

— Agatha Christie

I was trained mainly as a short story writer and that's how I started writing, but I've also become very interested in non-fiction, just…

— David Foster Wallace

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

— Carol Bly

Sometimes I say working on a story in a writers' room is like saying the same word over and over and over again until…

— Marti Noxon

Well, as a short-story writer, I don't think there are any weaknesses to the genre itself. I guess I would say that the difficulty…

— ZZ Packer

I write very raw, ugly, illiterate first drafts very quickly (novels are always in first draft in under a year) and then I spend…

— Porochista Khakpour

One of my favorite writers is short story writer/essayist Jorge Luis Borges, who was blind. I'm not claiming to be anything remotely resembling a…

— Larry Howes

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.

— Larry Niven

If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— David Means

It's not easy to tell a story about writers and make that feel like a complete story and an interesting story.

— Greg Kinnear