Steve Earle Quotes

Every story is organic, and every story finds its own ending.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

Stop trying to write sentences and start trying to write 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.

I don't ever want to impose something on the story. I want the story to tell me.

It's about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story, and all kinds of sonic goodness - sonic goodies.

A novel wouldn't be a book if there weren't some flights of fancy on the part of the author, stopping time to examine things, or to tell a joke.

Whatever you do in life, there's content and form; only those two put together create special meaning of a great work of art or great interpretation of music or a great story that you tell.

Sometimes I think I'm a one-trick pony because I'm not very inventive about new ways of telling stories.

In those days, it didn't take much imagination to come up with something that required great lyric development skills. You just thought of an experience that you might have gone through, and write it down.

I never accepted why there should be some invisible, wavy cutoff line separating Great Fiction from phosphorescent beauties and dollhouse miniatures, novels that contain a whole world in a snow globe.

I don't know if it's good or bad, but when I first started writing I imitated the narrative thrust of a movie. And as I worked, I learned what you can do in fiction that you can't do in movies, and vice-versa.

I'm not good at talking, but I can write a good song and tell a story.

As a songwriter, we're looking for a good story, and we're always looking to push the limits.

I don't know what that line is between fiction and non-fiction that other people have in their minds, but to me, when I'm writing, it's just like whatever the next sentence should be is the next sentence. It's not this artificial division.

A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.

I knew the beginning and the end – I just had to dream up a convincing middle.

The form is always integral to the expression of the theme or to the sheer telling of the story, and sometimes the right form is apparent to me from the outset and sometimes it isn't.

It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.

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

When I start to write, I see my stories as a kind of movie. For instance, I ask myself, "What kind of opening do I want for this book?"

When you're telling a story, you've got to give details.

Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.

have a much harder time writing stories than novels. I need the expansiveness of a novel and the propulsive energy it provides. When I think about scene - and when I teach scene writing - I'm thinking about questions. What questions are raised by a scene? What questions are answered? What questions persist from scene to scene to scene?

I consider a story merely as a frame on which to stretch my materials.