A good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs. A good short story asks a question that can’t be answered in simple terms. And even if we come up with some understanding, years later, while glancing out of a window, the story still has the potential to return, to alter right there in our mind and change everything.
Walter Mosley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Mosley
Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, painting, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.
Jim Jarmusch
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Jarmusch
Short stories do not say this happened and this happened and this happened. They are a microcosm and a magnification rather than a linear progression.
Isobelle Carmody
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isobelle_Carmody
Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.
Arthur Helps
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Helps
Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.
V.S. Pritchett
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V._S._Pritchett
The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.
Blaise Pascal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal
If you have one person you’re influenced by, everyone will say you’re the next whatever, But if you rip off a hundred people, everyone will say you’re so original.
Gary Panter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Panter
We want you to take from us. We want you, at first, to steal from us, because you can’t steal. You will take what we give you and you will put it in your own voice and that’s how you will find your voice. And that’s how you begin. And then one day someone will steal from you.
Francis Ford Coppola
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Ford_Coppola
It is better to take what doesn’t belong to you than to let it lie around neglected.
Mark Twain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain
The great thing about a short story is that it doesn’t have to trawl through someone’s whole life, it can come in glancingly from the side.
Emma Donoghue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Donoghue
