Irving Howe Quotes

I love short stories - reading and writing them. The best short stories distill all the potency of a novel into a small but heady draught. They are perfect reading material for the bus or train or for a lunchtime break. Everything extraneous has been strained off by the author. The best short stories pack the heft of any novel, yet resonate like poetry.

Writing and reading fiction is, I think, a human effort to make sense of the world.

Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.

It's difficult to write a really good short story because it must be a complete and finished reflection of life with only a few words to use as tools. There isn't time for bad writing in a short story.

I don't do flash fiction.

Writing a picture book is like writing 'War and Peace' in Haiku.

Writing for children is murder. A chapter has to be boiled down to a paragraph. Every word has to count.

Short stories are designed to deliver their impact in as few pages as possible. A tremendous amount is left out, and a good short story writer learns to include only the most essential information.

I was looking at a lot of experimental writers, and I was very intrigued by short-short fiction, writers who would write little things, what I call buttons now, little vignettes.

It's a principle of mine to come into the story as late as possible, and to tell it as fast as you can.

The finest words in the world are only vain sounds if you can't understand them. The best sentence? The shortest.

Sometimes ... the short short appears to rest on nothing more than a fragile anecdote which the writer has managed to drape with a quantity of suggestion. A single incident, a mere anecdote - these form the spine of the short short.

Stories are a different kind of true.

The unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance. It is clear, moreover, that this unity cannot be thoroughly preserved in productions whose perusal cannot be completed at one sitting.

In commercial fiction especially, everything in the story usually contributes directly to the plot The shorter the story, the truer this is

What are the proper proportions of a maxim? A minimum of sound to a maximum of sense.

For the entire decade of my 30s and the early part of my 40s, I didn't write a word of fiction. I just left behind a dream of my life.

Taking the question in general, I should say, in the case of many poets, that the most important thing for them to do ... is to write as little as possible

I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English - it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.

As a writer one doesn’t belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale, necessarily on the edge of society. Because society and people are our meat, one really doesn’t belong in the midst of society. The great challenge in writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And to do that, one needs distance.

When a poet writes a poem, meaning arises - because the poet is not alone; he has created something. When a dancer dances, meaning arises. When a mother gives birth to a child, meaning arises. Left alone, cut off from everything else, isolated like an island, you are meaningless. Joined together you are meaningful. The bigger the whole, the bigger is the meaning.

Don't 'write what you know.' Make up something new!

And a man's life's no more than to say "One."

books have been my greatest comfort, castle-building a never-failing delight, and scribbling a very profitable amusement.

Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.