Stephen R. George Quotes

When I started out in the early 1930s, there were a great many magazines that published short stories. Unfortunately, the short-story market has dwindled to almost nothing.

You know, it's sort of common wisdom among New York publishers that short story collections don't make money.

In the early 2000s, I started selling some short stories to horror markets. I joined the Horror Writers Association.

And write what you love - don't feel pressured to write serious prose if what you like is to be funny.

I am also working on a couple of short stories for anthologies. This is new to me and I'm enjoying it.

Whenever I have tried to write for other people, that's when my writing has failed, when nobody wanted to read it or buy it. But it's only when I've been able to write a story that makes me excited, only then have other people wanted to read it.

I'm a writer, not a genre.

I know from an editor's point of view or a publisher's point of view it's easier to slot me into a particular niche. But I know that I'd be bored unless I wrote a book that in some senses was a challenge.

I always just wanted to be a writer, not necessarily a particular kind of writer.

It's taken me 15 years to feel I might be able to write and publish short stories, and for the assiduous checks of the industry to allow some through.

When I went to university in Colorado, I was encouraged to write very innovative, experimental things, and some of the short stories in 'Bearded Ladies' are a little bit experimental.

I began tailoring my books to cater to one or another universe of readers. I found it incredibly boring; and frankly, it felt stultifying. I'd previously been in advertising. I felt if I was going to create something to fit a specific market, I might as well have stayed with advertising.

My first serious attempts at writing were made in 1868, and I took up two very different lines of composition; I wrote some short stories of a very flimsy type, and also a work of a much more ambitious character, 'The Lives of the Black Letter Saints.'

I think fiction writers should work. If you have a job and are not living off advances or grants, you never have to make concessions in your writing, ever.

I don't tend to do category fiction very well. One of my problems when I was starting off was that publishers were hesitant to handle my books because they were never sure what I was going to do next.

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've been writing since 1973. I've written nonfiction things of that nature, but I'm probably best known for crime fiction and, to some extent, horror fiction.

I always wrote as a vehicle for expression but did not try writing for publication until my mid-thirties, at which time I started writing for magazines. I wrote essays and then short stories, then moved into novels.

The vast majority of fiction is written to markets and to this damnable business we have nowadays of categorizing everything.

I sat down to try to write 'Edinburgh,' an autobiographical novel, and that took five years to write and two years to sell.

I've been writing fiction since I was a kid. From the age of 15 to 25, I probably wrote more than 50 short stories, one of which was published in 'The Paris Review' in 1989.

You do not give a great biographer a timetable. You let them do their work and, in due course, publish it.

When I sat down to write 'Rules of Civility,' I didn't write it for anybody but myself. I wasn't trying to make my mark or make money. I wasn't anxious about feeding my kids or whether my father would be proud of me.

Like pretty much every short story writer, I submitted to every market under the sun and hoped for the best. The rejection letters I've collected over the years can probably make a book of their own.

Being a writer is great because you get to come up with stuff.