David Means Quotes

Early influences included Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Charles Baxter, Richard Ford, Alice Munro, Denis Johnson - writers who are important to me still and who I discovered through my teachers.

Among contemporaries, I hugely admire Alice Munro, our Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike, American masters all. I also believe that the voice of Gordon Lish is astoundingly original and sorrowful.

Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.

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.

'At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom' by Amy Hempel showed me the lean quality of prose.

To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.

I studied the short story as part of my creative writing course at university but then set off as a novelist. Generally, there is a sense that even if you want to write short stories, you need to do a novel first.

If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms.

It wasn't until I started to read short stories - by people like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, John Updike... Eudora Welty - that I became excited about the possibilities of writing.

I have always loved short stories. I have been at least as influenced by the short story masters as I have been by novelists.

There are always interesting, innovative, dynamic stories being written and being published. They're not always being prominently published, but they're being published.

I'm trying to move a little more toward literary fiction while still retaining a popular feel.

I love to read the kind of books I write. Genre-breaking. Fresh-concept. World-building. My all-time top three authors would have to be Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Harris, and Pat Conroy.

I think most short story writers, at one time or another, over the course of several books, naturally skirt near the edge of one genre or another.

Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.

A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

I would like to write a book that wasn't so violent and weird, but I just don't think I can do that with my talent. I don't think it would come off.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

I love writing shorter fiction.

Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

I'm a novelist first, and I wrote a bunch of books, and everything I write, I just find people are more interesting when there's an element of humor to it.

Stephen King has inspired me with his humor and honesty, and his admonition that the author's job is to tell the truth.