Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.

Iris Murdoch

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_Murdoch

What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.

William Inge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Inge

We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?

Jean Cocteau

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Cocteau

Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad stories in a row.

Ray Bradbury

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Bradbury

The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself because he is absolutely himself.

Oscar Wilde

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde

In short stories, there’s more permission to be elliptical. You can have image-logic, or it’s almost like a poem in that you can come to a lot of meanings within a short space.

Karen Russell

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Russell

Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.

Anthony Trollope

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Trollope

Fiction is not a dream. Nor is it guesswork. It is imagining based on facts, and the facts must be accurate or the work of imagining will not stand up.

Margaret Culkin Banning

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Culkin_Banning

A short story is confined to one mood, to which everything in the story pertains. Characters, setting, time, events, are all subject to the mood. And you can try more ephemeral, more fleeting things in a story – you can work more by suggestion – than in a novel. Less is resolved, more is suggested, perhaps.

Eudora Welty

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudora_Welty

Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.

Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Blixen