“Make it interesting and it will be true: this is what story writers live by.” — Heidi Pitlor Copy Share Image
Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story. — F. Scott Fitzgerald Copy Share Image
I love Joy Williams, Lorrie Moore: such great short-story writers. — Carrie Brownstein Copy Share Image
Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better. — Ernest Hemingway Copy Share Image
Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more… — V. S. Pritchett Copy Share Image
The more original a short-story writer, the odder looking the assortment of things he or she puts together for a story. — Carol Bly Copy Share Image
You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean… — Larry Niven Copy Share Image
Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. — Gene Fowler Copy Share Image
Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in… — Anne McCaffrey Copy Share Image
I think most short story writers, at one time or another, over the course of several books, naturally skirt near the edge… — David Means Copy Share Image
I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell… — Edgar Rice Burroughs Copy Share Image
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them.… — Orson Scott Card Copy Share Image
Story writers say that love is concerned only with young people, and the excitement and glamour of romance end at the altar.… — Irving Stone Copy Share Image
One of my favorite writers is short story writer/essayist Jorge Luis Borges, who was blind. I'm not claiming to be anything remotely… — Larry Howes Copy Share Image
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… — Grace Paley Copy Share Image
Sometimes I say working on a story in a writers' room is like saying the same word over and over and over… — Marti Noxon Copy Share Image
Well, as a short-story writer, I don't think there are any weaknesses to the genre itself. I guess I would say that… — ZZ Packer Copy Share Image
I learned quickly enough when to click the shutter, but what I was becoming aware of more slowly was a story-writer's truth:… — Eudora Welty Copy Share Image
I love the necessary ambiguity of short stories - there simply isn't time to render every detail, so much of the story… — Matthew Healy Copy Share Image
Short stories are designed to deliver their impact in as few pages as possible. A tremendous amount is left out, and a… — Orson Scott Card Copy Share Image
Poetry died as a commercial form and then it died as a serious art form. No one serious touches it. It used… — William Monahan Copy Share Image
I write very raw, ugly, illiterate first drafts very quickly (novels are always in first draft in under a year) and then… — Porochista Khakpour Copy Share Image
Yes, I get dry spells. Sometimes I can't turn out a thing for three months. When one of those spells comes on… — O. Henry Copy Share Image
Short story writers simply do what human beings have always done. They write stories because they have to; because they cannot rest… — Andre Dubus Copy Share Image
If this "critical openminded attitude" ... is wanted, the question at once arises, Is it science that should be studied in order… — Anthony Standen Copy Share Image
It's not easy to tell a story about writers and make that feel like a complete story and an interesting story. — Greg Kinnear Copy Share Image
In a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter. — Annie Proulx Copy Share Image
Tom Kealey might be my favorite short story writer and this astonishing collection is long overdue. — Stephen Elliott Copy Share Image
“I wonder if that's the perennial story of writers: you find the true light, you lose the true light, you find it… — Sue Monk Kidd Copy Share Image
The short-story writer knows that he can't proceed cumulatively, that time is not his ally. His only solution is to work vertically,… — Julio Cortazar Copy Share Image
A lot of artists start out as failed poets, then move on to being failed short-story writers before they finally break through… — Gary Reilly Copy Share Image
All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it's just a matter of arranging them into the… — W. Somerset Maugham Copy Share Image
“I'd like to give these detective story writers a course of routine work. They'd soon learn how most things are untraceable and… — Agatha Christie Copy Share Image
If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor. — Edgar Rice Burroughs Copy Share Image
Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not… — Alice Munro Copy Share Image
For a short-story writer, a story is the combination of what the writer supposed the story would likely be about - plus… — Carol Bly Copy Share Image
What the readers want is a good story, and what the writers always want to luck into, it's a good story. — Stephen Graham Jones Copy Share Image
