“My favorite form is the short story. From an aesthetics stand point you really have to pare down to the bone. You can't write a throw-away scene.”

“The problem of the novel is to stay truthful. The short story, if you really are intense and you have an exciting idea, writes itself in a few hours.”

“After every war, there's an immense overhaul of language, which in the Western world has created really the cultural and artistic phenomenon of what we call modernism; that is, a paring down of everything to minimal size, including language and ideas of grandeur, and ideas of a possibility of the state making everybody happy, and things like that. That modernism is really a form of skepticism or minimalism. You cut out everything that has deceived you and throw it away, and that leaves you with things like the Eames chair and Picasso and numerous other outcrops of modernism.”

“I really like Septimus Heap. he is my favorite guy in the story. I should make you all read it.”

“McGough: I'm sorry. I'm afraid I've caught poetry.

Mr Bones: Oh really? Well, don't worry, sir - I used to suffer from short stories.

McGough: Really? When?

Mr Bones: Oh, once upon a time…”

“This is the place. Stand still, my steed,—
Let me review the scene,
And summon from the shadowy past
The forms that once have been.”

“When you write a short story … you had better know the ending first.”

“I'll give you the whole secret to short story writing. Here it is. Rule 1: Write stories that please yourself. There is no Rule 2.”

“The last scene came really, really early, disconnected from even the idea of a woman painter…I wanted to write a love story and I thought, ‘What do I want to tell?’ And that scene came up really, really quickly, alone, by itself. The weird compass of the film was its last scene. That’s a compass, but it’s a high pressure one.”

“Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.”