Novels And Short Quotes & Sayings

Honestly, not being evasive, but the great thing about Bond is that I have fifty years of movies - 23 movies and all the Ian Fleming novels and short stories, all of which are fodder. And when I'm working on the new Bond, I'm constantly going back to Fleming and the other movies - what are the bits and pieces, what are the resonances? — John Logan

Mother made sure her little kids were subjected to a strict routine. We were given a timetable which covered our every waking moment, copies of which were posted by our bedside, in the sitting room and in the kitchen. Story hour meant that mother would read us novels and short stories by Guy de Maupassant, Oscar Wilde and Edmondo de Amicis. Soon we graduated to Tolstoy, Gogol and Turgenev. She read them to us in Chinese and I never realised until much later that the writers wrote them in different European languages. Comics were absolutely forbidden and so were Enid Blyton adventures and pop music ... Lee Cyn and I soon went to a primary school nearby ... After mother's rigorous timetable, school became fun and easy-going. — Ang Swee Chai

I've published several virtually invisible novels and several dozen even more invisible short stories over the years, all of which give me joy - unlike the cumulative experience of seeking publishers for them! — Scott Bradfield

Writing is my number one passion. I've written two novels. I've written a screenplay. I also write short stories and poetry. — Evangeline Lilly

I was incredibly determined - I wrote short stories, I wrote the beginnings of novels. I wrote a little children's book and sent it to the editor-in-chief of the children's division of Simon and Schuster and she asked me to write a little children's book for a series she was doing. — Candace Bushnell

I read more than I had in years-novels, short stories, three long nonfiction books about how we had stumbled into the Iraq mess (the short answer appeared to have W for a middle initial and a dick for a Vice President). — Stephen King

The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read. — Anthony Burgess

Experiments with the "as if" of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels. — Ben Lerner

I wrote my first two long novels and an anthology of short narratives, when I was a manager of my own jazz bar. There was not enough time to write and I didn't know how to write novels. Therefore, I made written collages of aphorisms and rags. — Haruki Murakami

I am a dash man and not a miler, and it is probable that I will never write a novel. So far the novels of this war have had too much of the strength, maturity and craftsmanship critics are looking for, and too little of the glorious imperfections which teeter and fall off the best minds. The men who have been in this war deserve some sort of trembling melody rendered without embarrassment or regret. I'll watch for that book. — J.D. Salinger

One word after another. That's the only way that novels get written and, short of elves coming in the night and turning your jumbled notes into Chapter Nine, it's the only way to do it. So keep on keeping on. Write another word and then another. — Neil Gaiman

We do seem, as a culture, to fetishize the "sweep." But I know there's room for "big" short, fierce novels, and "big" solid ones. — Meg Wolitzer

There are some short essays that are very grave, and most contemporary novels are lighter than air. — Fran Lebowitz

American students, we are told, are falling behind in reading and math; on test after test, they score below most European students (at the level of Lithuania), and the solution, rather than seeking to engage their curiosity, has been testing and more testing - a dry and brittle method that produces lackluster results. And so resources are pulled from the "soft" fields that are not being tested. Music teachers are being fired or not replaced; art classes are quietly dropped from the curriculum; history is simplified and moralized, with little expectation that any facts will be learned or retained; and instead of reading short stories, poems and novels, students are invited to read train schedules and EPA reports whose jargon could put even the most committed environmentalist to sleep. — Azar Nafisi

To me, fiction writing at any length, in any form, is a feat of radical compression: take the sprawling chaos of human experience, run it through the sieve of perception, and distill it into something comparatively miniscule that somehow, miraculously, illuminates the vast complexity around it. I don't think about short stories any differently than I do about novels or novellas or even memoirs. But the smaller scale of a story is important; the distillation must be even more extreme in order to succeed. It also must be purer; there is almost no room for mistakes. — Jennifer Egan

We like to look out on the world and see ourselves, so we have many, many novels, memoirs, and short stories in Iraq that are largely about Americans in Iraq, doing what Americans do. — Elliott Colla

I'd love to see more novels and short stories where the characters have their own folklore that isn't the Plot-Bearing Prophecy of Doom. — Marie Brennan

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. — Aimee Bender

I live in Harlem, New York City. I am unmarried. I like 'Tristan,' goat's milk, short novels, lyric poems, heat, simple folk, boats and bullfights; I dislike 'Aida,' parsnips, long novels, narrative poems, cold, pretentious folk, buses and bridges. — Langston Hughes

There was a time in my life when I wasn't sure I'd ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person's form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress. — Elizabeth McCracken

Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women. — Colm Toibin

I have not read most of the big 19th - century novels that people consider "essential," nor most of the 20th-century ones for that matter. But this does not embarrass me. There are many films to see, many friends to visit, many walks to take, many playlists to assemble and many favorite books to reread. Life's too short for anxious score-keeping. Also, my grandmother is illiterate, and she's one of the best people I know. Reading is a deep personal consolation for me, but other things console, too. — Teju Cole

Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark ... your words come out, and then nothing ... but I don't think that's why I tend to write novels rather than stories. — Alice McDermott

I'm one of those writers who started off writing novels and came to writing short stories later, partly because I didn't have the right ideas, partly because I think that short stories are more difficult. I think learning to write short stories also made me attracted toward a paring down of the novel form. — Julian Barnes

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. — M.K. Hobson

Short stories and some short novels are close to poetry
with the fewest words they capture the essence of a situation, of a human being. It's like trying to pin down the eternal moment. — Gina Berriault

I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent. — Stephen Graham Jones

I come from a prose background. I come from short story background, and that led me into novels. — Greg Rucka

I can't be reading novels when I'm writing a novel, because somebody's voice creeps in. The hardest thing to do is keep the tone and your attitude over the course of a year or however long it takes.But when I'm writing short stories, which I will be doing shortly, I can read anything I like. — T.C. Boyle

...and lovers of romance novels and dissident rebels and brothers in Christ and druids and shamans and aphrodisiac vendors and scriveners and purveyors of real fake passports and gun-runners and porters and bric-a-brac trades and mining prospectors short on liquid assets and Siamese twins... — Fiston Mwanza Mujila

READING, n. The general body of what one reads. In our country it consists, as a rule, of Indiana novels, short stories in "dialect" and humor in slang. — Ambrose Bierce

You think you're writing one historical novel and it turns into three, and I'm quite used to a short story turning into a novel - that's happened through my whole career. — Hilary Mantel

Traditionally, people have been adapting novels and short stories forever. Now, they're doing it simultaneously, with an eye towards writing the movie before the novel has even come out or been finished. It's a function of this hyper-accelerated society we live in, where everyone is trying to short circuit the process. — Howard Gordon

Here, in short, is the great danger of reading most novels, romances, and works of fiction. The greater part of them give a false or incorrect view of human nature. They paint their model men and women as they ought to be, and not as they really are. The readers of such writings get their minds filled with wrong conceptions of what the world is. Their notions of mankind become visionary and unreal. They are constantly looking for men and women such as they never meet, and expecting what they never find. — J.C. Ryle

LIFE IS AN ENTHUSIASM. MY EXPERIENCE OF LIFE, MY VISION ALL ARE MENTION IN MY BOOKS. WRITING LANGUAGE - MALAYALAM. I BORN AND BROUGHT UP IN KERALA. MY LIFE PERIOD MORE THAN 28 YEARS WORKING IN THE MIDDLE EAST. IN MY LIFE EXPERIENCE INVOLVED IN MY ALL LITERARY WORKS - POEMS, DRAMA, NOVELS, TRAVELOGUES, SHORT STORIES & SCREENPLAY. — Saravan Maheswer

I'm going to marry my novels and have little short stories for children. — Jack Kerouac

All my writing-life people kept telling me that I should stop writing short stories and start writing novels: my agent, my Israeli publisher, my foreign ones, my bank manager - they all felt and keep feeling that I'm doing something wrong here. — Etgar Keret

When we condescend, when we act consistently with a sense of the character of people in general which demeans them, we impoverish them AND ourselves, and preclude our having a part in the creation of the highest wealth, the testimony to the mysterious beauty of life we all value in psalms and tragedies and epics and meditations, in short stories and novels. — Marilynne Robinson

I imagine I should have told it to you before? I love you, Sejal.I wish for you to become my wife.Recently I've also opened a shop in North Dakota and thinking that, just maybe, you love me too. — Chayada Welljaipet

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. — Tobias Wolff

I read daily, not so much for the benefit of my writing, but because I am addicted to it. There is nothing in the world for me that compares to being lost in a really good novel. That said, reading is an absolute must if you want to write. It is a trite enough thing to say, but very true nonetheless. I cannot understand aspiring writers who email me for advice and freely admit that they read very little. I have learned something from every writer I have ever read. Sometimes I have done so consciously, picking up something about how to frame a scene, or seeing a new possibility with regards to structure, or interesting ways to write dialogue. Other times, I think, my collective reading experience affects my sensibilities and informs me in ways that I am not quite aware of, but in real ways that impact how I approach writing. The short of it is, as an aspiring writer, there is nothing as damaging to your credibility as saying that you don't like to read — Khaled Hosseini

I started trying to be a writer and failed for years. I tried novels, short stories, sitcoms, movies, plays, anything. And then, to support myself, I had millions of jobs on the fringes of show business. — Bruce Eric Kaplan

Lost Cactus is a cornucopia of sights, sounds and inhabitants completely foreign to a little squirrel like Sammy, but attempting to set him straight will only complicate matters. — John Hopkins

Not everyone can experience what other people can... That's why movies come out... films and books... and short stories and novels... — Deyth Banger

Even when there's not a joke or a hook, the first line has to be good and snapem to attention. Songs ain't novels. You don't have 30 pages to slowly wrap somebody in. They're more like short stories or poems. If the first line hasn't grabbed them, you won't get to the second line. Once you've developed an audience, you may have some luxury and trust, so you don't have to knock 'em over the head with line one. — Dan Bern

I feel quite at home writing short stories but nervous and anxious when writing novels, as if the bad time of consecutive failures might arise again. — Charles Baxter

Will Cato's alien buddies come en masse and invade Earth? He's not sure but he'll try to keep humanity in the loop. — John Hopkins

In writing short stories - as in writing novels - take one
thing at a time. (For some writers, this advice I'm giving may
apply best to a first draft; for others, it may hinder the flow at
first but be useful when time for revision comes.) Treat a short
passage of description as a complete unit and make that one
small unit as perfect as you can; then turn to the next unit
a passage of dialogue, say - and make that as perfect as you can.
Move to larger units, the individual scenes that together make
up the plot, and work each scene until it sparkles. — John Gardner

Glad to know about all of you who care about books, including or especially poetry. I'm a much published writer/editor of 12 books (medical nonfiction, literary novels, mysteries) and much short work, inc. prize-winning pieces. — Carole Spearin McCauley

That's something that would really sell. I mean, I admire that you tell stories of make-believe people in worlds that don't exist and that have no relevance to how we live. That can be nice, but people also like things that are uplifting and practical.
(From the short story: The Late Novels of Gene Hackman) — Rivka Galchen

Thus far, I've devoted my entire career to publishing genre short fiction, but I now look forward to applying that same level of curation to finding the best new novels and new authors. — John Joseph Adams

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. — Anne Lamott

I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium. — Lynn Abbey

When I was one day old, I learned how to read. When I was two days old, I started to write. By the time I was three, I had finished 212 short stories, 38 novels, 730 poems, and one very funny limerick, all before breakfast. — Jon Scieszka

Jim Harrison's novels, John McPhee's nonfiction, Flannery O'Connor's short stories, and the crime novels of John Sandford, Ken Bruen, and T. Jefferson Parker. His books — C.J. Box

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. — Dani Shapiro

Now and then I am asked as to "what books a statesman should read," and my answer is, poetry and novels - including short stories under the head of novels. I don't mean that he should read only novels and modern poetry. If he cannot also enjoy the Hebrew prophets and the Greek dramatists, he should be sorry. He ought to read interesting books on history and government, and books of science and philosophy; and really good books on these subjects are as enthralling as any fiction ever written in prose or verse. — Theodore Roosevelt

Many people have said to me, "What a pity you had such a big family to raise." "Think of the novels and the short stories and the poems you never had time to write because of that." And I looked at my children and I said, "These are my poems, these are my stories." — Olga Masters

I am drawn to writing books about magic and the supernatural because those are the types of books I like to read. I've written many short stories with realistic settings, and I certainly wouldn't rule out realistic novels in the future! — Cassandra Clare

I tell writers not to think about writing short stories or novels. Just write one good scene. And then a novel becomes a bunch of good scenes stacked on top of each other. — Joe Hill

The words you can't find, you borrow.
We read to know we're not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone.
My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.
We are not quite novels.
The analogy he is looking for is almost there.
We are not quite short stories. At this point, his life is seeming closest to that.
In the end, we are collected works. — Gabrielle Zevin

The reason I shift gears constantly, why I'm doing an opera, why I've done essays, why I've written poetry for years that nobody wanted, why I do short stories and novels and screenplays ... is so I will have new ways of failing. This means becoming a student again. — Ray Bradbury

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 — Dean Koontz

I write short stories. They may appear big in size, but when you consider it, they're four or five novels in one ... In return for picking up one of my books, I'm trying to give them value for their money ... the goal of writing any book is to create the illusion that what you are reading is reality and you're part of it. — James Clavell

I had a story-telling mother; she's written novels and short stories. So I feel like maybe I'm staying alive by telling tales. — Ayshay

As Amani frantically diced the ingredients for her Pan seared Mahi-Mahi with Mango Salsa, she recalled her first meeting with him during a class he taught on the presentation of food and organization the previous year. Amani had been immediately drawn to the tall, serious Californian, and not just because of his looks. With dark wavy hair, strong features and the deepest blue eyes she had ever seen short of Paul Newman's, David Spencer was everything Amani admired in a man, and then some. — Joanna Hynes

The algorithms in his hard drive scrambled and his coding short-circuited. Like she'd downloaded a virus right into his system, he got feverishly hot. — Kelly Moran

New thing is made in writting books, (novels, short stories... stories...)... It's to be build a character which you will love you will like him.... and one moment he dies... isn't it awesome? — Deyth Banger

I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me. — Bruce Coville

Utter objectivity ... is not only impossible when judging literature, it's not exactly desirable. Fiction involves trace elements of magic; it works for reasons we can explain and also for reasons we can't. If novels or short-story collections could be weighed strictly in terms of their components (fully developed characters, check; original voice, check; solidly crafted structure, check; serious theme, check) they might satisfy, but they would fail to enchant. A great work of fiction involves a certain frisson that occurs when its various components cohere and then ignite.
(Source: "Letter from the Pulitzer Fiction Jury: What Really Happened This Year" in The New Yorker.) — Michael Cunningham

I've made seventeen or eighteen films now, only two of which have been original screenplays, all the others have been based on short stories or novels, and I find the long short story ideal for adaptation. — Satyajit Ray

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

Novels have much more space than short stories, which gives you more leeway with the number of characters you can include. Even 'furniture' characters can be described and given speaking parts to develop background or atmosphere. — Nancy Kress

I have always felt a special affinity with V. S. Pritchett. He worked from the ear, primarily, as I do, and he was an all-rounder, writing short stories, novels, memoir, travelogue, critical biography. He lived to be almost 100, and he never stopped, and his work is unified by a great generosity of spirit. — Kevin Barry

Once you have learned to trust your own voice and allowed that creative force inside you to come out, you can direct it to write short stories, novels, and poetry, do revisions, and so on. You have the basic tool to fulfill your writing dreams. But beware. This type of writing will uncover other dreams you have, too-going to Tibet, being the first woman president of the United States, building a solar studio in New Mexico-and they will be in black and white. It will be harder to avoid them. — Natalie Goldberg

It took me thirty-six years; and, in some fifty stories, ranging in length from short-shorts to novels, I think I must have touched, in one way or another, on every aspect of computers and computerization. And (mark this!) I did it without ever knowing anything at all about computers in any real sense. To this day, I don't. I am totally inept with machinery ... on my typewriter I turn out books at the contemptible rate of one a month — Isaac Asimov

People who wrote novels about universities hardly ever got them right. Max had spent his short working life untenured, but still he'd managed to be a charming magnet wherever he taught, and Amy had surfeited on faculty gossip and professorial antics and the general behavior of academics, who were as a whole no more brilliant or Machiavellian than travel agents. They tended toward shabbier clothes and manners, and of course there was the occasional storied eccentric or truly original mind, but most college campuses - especially the older ones - functioned less as brain trusts than as wildlife preserves, housing and protecting people who wouldn't last a week in GenPop. — Jincy Willett

If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer? — Jennifer Weiner

I started writing because I wanted to write scripts, but I wasn't very good at it. Then I started writing short stories, sort of as treatments for the film scripts, and I found I enjoyed writing short stories far more than I enjoyed writing film scripts. Then the short stories got longer and longer and suddenly, I had novels. — Jasper Fforde

I bought a selection of short, romantic fiction novels, studied them, decided that I had found a formula and then wrote a book that I figured was the perfect story. Thank goodness it was rejected. — Louise Brown

I sold my first short story while I was home on maternity leave, then began working on novels. Since I was reading and enjoying romance novels at the time, the first two unpublished manuscripts I wrote were both romances. I sold my third novel, 'Call After Midnight,' to Harlequin Intrigue after submitting it unagented. — Tess Gerritsen

If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden. The two processes complement each other, creating a complete landscape that I treasure. The green foliage of the trees casts a pleasant shade over the earth, and the wind rustles the leaves, which are sometimes dyed a brilliant gold. Meanwhile, in the garden, buds appear on the flowers, and colorful petals attract bees and butterflies, reminding us of the subtle transition from one season to the next. — Haruki Murakami

Books are more than doctors, of course. Some novels are loving, lifelong companions; some give you a clip around the ear; others are friends who wrap you in warm towels when you've got those autumn blues. And some...well, some are pink candy floss that tingles in your brain for three seconds and leaves a blissful voice. Like a short, torrid love affair. — Nina George

I was intentionally curbing the impulse to be funny and hiding the ability. I wrote any number of very serious attempts at poems, short stories, novels - horrible. At a certain point, I recognized that it was fun to write dialogue that had a degree of lightness and humor. — Patrick DeWitt

A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don't run out of energy (or in the case of the novelist
ideas) because they have so far to run. To mix the metaphor, writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage. — Jonathan Carroll

The majority of American writers today have chosen passive non-resistance to things as they are, producing sloughs of poetry about their personal angst and anomie, cascades of short stories and rivers of novels obsessed with the nuances of domestic relationships - suburban hanky-panky - chic boutique shopping mall literary soap opera. When they do speak out on matters of controversy they attack not the evils of our time but fellow writers who may insist on complaining. — Edward Abbey

The novels take longer to write than the picture book texts, and they do take a different sort of concentration. However, a very short, simple story that works well is just as exciting to me as any longer and more complex book. — Margaret Mahy

I write very raw, ugly, illiterate first drafts very quickly (novels are always in first draft in under a year) and then I spend years and years fine-tuning, revising, editing, etc. What inspires me? Who knows. I am not inspired that much. That's why I write long form fiction - I am not much of a short story writer. Ideas come seldom, but when a good one comes, I really stick to it and see it out. I'm a problem-solver - I've never thrown out an entire manuscript; I've always forced myself to repair it until it was a lovable thing again. — Porochista Khakpour

I've always been ambidextrous, writing short stories and novels, and I pretty much have been writing a novel and a handful of short stories every year since '91. — Catherine Ryan Hyde

I enjoy writing plays most. I haven't written a radio play in a while and I don't write short stories anymore because the process of submitting them depressed me. I really enjoy revising novels, but drafting them can be a pain. — Sefi Atta

You have to be kind of clued into them, they are a world of their own, and most people find them disappointing because the best short stories are not constructed like novels. — Tobias Wolff

Ruskin says that anyone who expects perfection from a work of art knows nothing of works of art. This is an appealing sentence that, so far as I can see, is not true about a few pictures and statues and pieces of music, short stories and short poems. Whether or not you expect perfection from them, you get it; at least, there is nothing in them that you would want changed. But what Ruskin says is true about novels: anyone who expects perfection from even the greatest novel knows nothing of novels. — Randall Jarrell

Works of art are not so much finished as abandoned. Perhaps poems can be perfect. A short-short story might even be perfectible, as effective and enjoyable for one reader as the next. But novels and other book-length narratives are great rambling things that always contain some flaws. For works of any length, there comes a point when your continued tinkering won't improve the whole, but will just trade one set of problems for another. — Bruce Holland Rogers

I wanted to avoid what some modern tellers have done, quite legitimately, to make fairy tales more like novels and short stories, to characterize the heroes and the heroines much more than they are characterized in Grimm. I like the psychological flatness of them, the fact that they're more like masks than individuals. — Philip Pullman

Though my short stories are the more readable, my novels do have more to say; and they will, if anyone has the patience for it, repay a rereading. — R.A. Lafferty

My life is in these books. Read these and know my heart. We are not quire novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works. — Gabrielle Zevin

I know I'll keep writing poems. That's the constant. I don't know about novels. They're hard. It takes so much concentrated effort. When I'm writing a novel it's pretty much all I can do. I get bored. It takes months. Movies do the same thing. It's all-encompassing. It feels like I'm going to end up writing poems, short stories and screenplays. — Sherman Alexie

I guess that isn't the right word, she said. She was used to apologizing for her use of language. She had been encouraged to do a lot of that in school. Most white people in Midland City were insecure when they spoke, so they kept their sentences short and their words simple, in order to keep embarrassing mistakes to a minimum. Dwayne certainly did that. Patty certainly did that.
This was because their English teachers would wince and cover their ears and give them flunking grades and so on whenever they failed to speak like English aristocrats before the First World War. Also: they were told that they were unworthy to speak or write their language if they couldn't love or understand incomprehensible novels and poems and plays about people long ago and far away, such as Ivanhoe. — Kurt Vonnegut

I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels ... a Library of Congress worth of awful literature. — Seth Grahame-Smith

Even so-called 'short novels' are pretty long and can take several hours to read, so make sure you stay hydrated. I like to keep an isotonic sports drink handy if I'm going to be reading for any longer than forty minutes. I'll also take regular breaks and make sure I'm wearing loose-fitting clothing. — Richard Ayoade