David Means Quotes

I like short stories.

You have only so many chances to tell stories. I didn't want to be forever wedded to one form of storytelling when there are so many out there.

Poetry, fiction as novels or short stories - these are autonomous as created by their authors. They should stand on their own, like pieces of furniture that should be judged as to their usefulness, elegance.

Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

I consider myself a writer. I don't favour any type of writing. I sometimes wish short stories came more easily to me.

I've always loved short stories. Even before I was a writer, I was reading short stories - there were certain writers where I just felt like they could do in a short story what so many writers needed a whole novel to do, and that was really inspiring to me.

Technique is of less interest than character and story.

I love novels, and I read them more than anything, but stories cut in sharp and hard and are able to reveal things in a different way: they're highly charged, a slightly newer form, and inherently more contemporary.

Short stories and poems are an intense burst of emotions.

I find that in a novel I can get more of life, perhaps not such intense life, but certainly more of life than in poetry.

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

The trouble with telling a good story is that it invariably reminds the other fellow of a dull one.

I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories to novels. But poetry was always there.

The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.

I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.

These days, I like to think of sentences as workers. Only one of their jobs is to look and sound good. Sentences are the carriers of plot. They're the conjurers of images, the conveyors of tone and meaning and voice. The best sentences surprise us.

What you compose with is neither here nor there, you compose with words, or you compose with stone plants and trees, or you compose with events; the Sheriff's officer, or whatever.

I'm not a 'long writer' and have never wanted to write a novel or even a novella. Poetry, like flash fiction, provides a readily accessible canvas to play with. Whether to express an emotion or share a vignette, these forms are often interchangeable.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

I came to the conclusion that I am not a fiction writer.

I do feel that if you can write one good sentence and then another good sentence and then another, you end up with a good story.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

I've never written poetry. I'm not a poet, but I think the nearest you get is either the short story or the novella, in that you can't waste a word. There is no hiding place: everything's got to be seen to relate, and the prose counts.

Literature, of course, is not a contest.

What greatly annoys me is sometimes you see the short story being described as a training ground for the novel. Kind of like an apprenticeship. And in lots of ways, it's a far harder form.