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Short Story Quotes

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Short Story Quotes

“When I was eight years old, I wrote a paragraph-long short story about a goat on my mother's hundred-pound, black-and-white-screen laptop. The story came about largely because I liked the way the word 'goat' looked on the page, but I decided then and there that I wanted to be a writer. That desire never changed.”

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Author:Tea Obreht
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“Dialogue that is written in dialect is very tiring to read. If you can do it brilliantly, fine. If other writers read your work and rave about your use of dialect, go for it. But be positive that you do it well, because otherwise it is a lot of work to read short stories or novels that are written in dialect. It makes our necks feel funny.”

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Author:Anne Lamott
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“Before World War II, I was living a very cloistered existence, as most cartoonists do. The work I was pouring out did not come from any real, personal life experience; this was all the residue of the accumulation of Rafael Sabatini, O. Henry, all the short-story writers that I'd been reading.”

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Author:Will Eisner
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“I should say that, in addition to my tree-love (it was originally called The Tree), it arose from my own pre-occupation with the Lord of the Rings, the knowledge that it would be finished in great detail or not at all, and the fear (near certainty) that it would be 'not at all'. The war had arisen to darken all horizons. But no such analyses are a complete explanation even of a short story.”

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Author:J. R. R. Tolkien
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“Really, the moment you have any idea, the second thought that enters your mind after the original idea is, "What is this? Is it a book, is it a movie, is it a this, is it a that, is it a short story, is it a breakfast cereal?" Really, from that moment, your decision about what kind of thing it is then determines how it develops.”

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Author:Douglas Adams
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“I was a Teletype operator in the army, so that's where I learned to type. One day, I went downstairs to see if I could still type - I hadn't done it for four or five years after the war. So I typed out a page and I showed it to my wife and she said, "Where did you get this?" I said I wrote it. "You wrote this?" It was something very funny. I went and wrote another page, another couple of pages, and by the time I was finished I had 13 little short stories, humorous short stories.”

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Author:Carl Reiner
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“Hanns Heinz Ewers tells a short story of a boy who was so unnatural of disposition as to take a special delight in people sick with elephantiasis. Our "European intellectuality" finds itself in an identical condition today which, through Jewish pens, worships the Kokoschka, Chagalls and Pechsteins as the leaders of the Art of the future. Features of degeneracy are already apparent, as, for instance, with Schwalbach, who dares representing Jesus as flat footed and bow legged.”

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Author:Alfred Rosenberg
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“If Edgar Allan Poe were alive today, his agent would be constantly slapping him upside the head with tightly rolled copies of his brilliant short stories and novelettes, yelling, 'Full-length novels, you moron! Pay attention! What's the matter with you -- are you shooting heroin or something? Write for the market! No more of this midlength 'Fall of the House of Usher' crap”

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Author:Dean Koontz
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