Padgett Powell Quotes

My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.

If you are working in an office, where do you find the time to write a novel? But you can finish a short story in five pages. Furthermore, a short story is a perfect place to learn the craft.

My shorthand answer is that I try to write the kind of book that I would like to read. If I can make it clear and interesting and compelling to me, then I hope maybe it will be for the reader.

I had no ambition to be a writer because the books I read were too good, my standards were too high.

The first book you write because of the way it makes you feel. The second one you can't help but wonder how it's going to make the reader feel.

When I was eight years old, I wrote a paragraph-long short story about a goat on my mother's hundred-pound, black-and-white-screen laptop. The story came about largely because I liked the way the word 'goat' looked on the page, but I decided then and there that I wanted to be a writer. That desire never changed.

A lot of the time writers are just sponges... for what's around them, and so books are helpful for focusing your mind and literally putting it into words.

Usually, I would mistrust a book if it took that long to write. Usually, if it isn't done in two years, I suspect there's something wrong and throw it away.

I just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and move forward from there.

Nobody sits down and says, 'Well, I'm going to write a bad book.' They sit down to write a great book, but it doesn't always turn out like that. The writer may do his best and still write a so-so book, and other times, it just flows easily. But I don't know how you can control that.

The only other thing which I think is important is: Don't write a book or start a book with the expectation of communicating a message in a very important way.

I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I'm writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories.

Having reached the halfway mark in the alphabet, my prime focus is on writing each new book as well as I can.

Even though I don't write about things that come from my life because I'm lucky, and I live in a great place with great kids and, you know, a great husband, I think you can find threads of me in the characters, so that's really what being a writer is, probably.

I don't know where I would place myself in the literary landscape. I really just write the book that I would want to read. And I put on the blinders, and I really - it is, for me, that simple.

When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

I keep telling myself I should try very hard to write a novel of about 210 pages... I don't seem to be capable of it, but I keep hoping it will happen.

Once I have the grain of an idea, it haunts me until I finish the story. I don't like to be haunted, of course, so immediately get to work.

I think when you first start out, you're writing books that are about your immediate place.

As a writer, I can't really take days off. Writing is like creating an art. Once you stop writing, you can lose your rhythm and context, meaning that your writing may lose its power.

I do think that short story writing is often a matter of luck.

When I'm writing a novel, I'm usually just trying to write about things that are interesting to me.

I can tell you that I never begin working on a story until I have a title centered at the top of the first page.

I still write the occasional short story, and poked at a novel once, but it's just not what I want to do.