I did the only thing I could. I said the dumbest thing any man has ever said to a woman, “Yeah, it’s just me and my trash can here,” as I patted its lid and started pushing it up the driveway.
Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, compo...
He looked her over with blatant intent, his gaze containing an edge that had her swallowing hard before she could stop herself. "Do you know what I think?" he said at last. "I live to hear such things." He stepped forward, only a handful of steps, bu...
I will teach my daughter to color outside the lines, to make mistakes, to take risks, and not be afraid to fail. I will teach her that even when the world tries to knock her down the best revenge is getting up and forging ahead. I will teach her to b...
The exhausted earth groaned and quivered under the monotonous glare of the sun. Spirals of heat rose from the ground as if from molten lava. A panting lizard crawled painfully over the fevered rock in search of a shady crevice. Cattle and dogs cringe...
Thus, words being symbols of ideas, we can collect ideas by collecting words. The fellow who said he tried reading the dictionary but couldn't get the hang of the story simply missed the point: namely, that it is a collection of short stories.
When I was nine years old, I wrote a short story called 'How to Build a Snowman,' from which no practical snowperson-crafting techniques could be gleaned. The story was an assignment for class and it featured a series of careful but meaningless instr...
I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I'm writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories.
Stories of all lengths and depths come from different parts of the cave. For a novel, you must lay in mental, physical and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame...
I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.
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.
The story is always in service to the characters, and is only as long or short, or neat or ragged as it needs to be.
I was well traveled, and I created this illusion of literacy through reading and writing. I wrote a book of short stories.
Everything Sholom Aleichem talks about in his plays and his short stories is about people, family, man's relationship with his God, the breaking down of tradition.
Short stories, for me, it's like you step inside this brand new car and you drive it and you drive it into a tree and you walk away from it.
Brushing up on your short game at the practice area is fine and good, but taking it with you to the golf course - when your score is really on the line - is another story.
I write as a matter of need - seven books and God knows how many short stories before anyone published me.
I don't think I'd have the stamina, skill or ability to write a novel, but I'd love to write short stories and poetry, because those are my two passions.
A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.
I'm very interested in writing - it just takes so much discipline, whether it's short stories or novels.
Robert Louis Stevenson... I'm focusing on the late short stories that I was ignorant of. I always thought he was a boys' author, but he's not at all.
