Anton Chekhov Quotes

I would recommend the short story form, which is a lot harder to write since you have to be so careful with words, until there is plenty of time to doodle through a novel.

The move to creating stories was a natural progression for me, but the most pivotal time was probably in 6th grade: That year, a friend introduced me to the stories of Ray Bradbury, and a student teacher introduced me to creative writing.

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.

I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story.

I have to write what I can write, and writing the text of a picture book is like walking a tightrope, if you ramble off... As my friend Julius Lester says, 'A picture book is the essence of an experience.'

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

Literature invents its own rules.

You have to write your own story, your own graph and rhythm.

If you're a good writer, you don't have everybody shouting in every scene.

A good story is like a bitter pill, with the sugar coating inside of it.

All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.

I write short stories. I write every day.

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.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

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

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.

There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.

I would never make up a character who didn't exist or an event that didn't transpire. If you're a real writer, you have other tools in your toolbox to build drama.

It's funny, because I don't think of myself as a novelist. I think of myself as a writer.

I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

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 like the eclipses, the synaptic jumps of short stories. The reader has to participate very actively in the experience.

Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.

When I tell people there are three stories in 'Thunderstruck' that were from the same wrecked novel, they want to guess what they are. Nobody has. There are no characters or timelines in common. They're structured very differently. A good novel wouldn't have pulled apart so easily.

Though my stories aren't autobiographical, I do sometimes use things from my life.