“I took a Greyhound bus to New York and stayed at the YMCA, fifty cents a night. I took my stories around to a dozen publishers. Nobody wanted them. They said, We don’t publish stories. Nobody reads them. Don’t you have a novel?”

—  Ray Bradbury

The Paris Review interview (2010)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Ray Bradbury 401
American writer 1920–2012

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“The ‘novel’ is a publishing convention that deforms the story. If more attention were given to form there would be fewer novels and better stories. There's no reason a publisher can’t put out a story that's a hundred or even seventy pages long. But a publisher will look at a story like that as defective novel, ineligible for shortlists. It should be in a collection. Or pumped full of air, turned into a novel… It's a pity. You see some good writers behaving like performing monkeys.”

Philip Ó Ceallaigh (1968) Irish writer

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“This is a bad story.”
“Sorry. I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have told you.”
“No, you should,” I say.
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Richard Matheson photo

“I hate it when something I’ve had published "inspires" some nut to imitate what I’ve written, or some teacher gets fired for having her students read one of my stories or novels.”

Richard Matheson (1926–2013) American fiction writer

"Ed Gorman Calling: We Talk to Richard Matheson" http://www.mysteryfile.com/Matheson/Interview.html (2004)

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“I don’t know what I want.
Nobody knows — or if they do, they don’t know for long.”

Tallulah Bankhead (1902–1968) American actress

"I want everything" http://home.earthlink.net/~2lulah2/everything.htm in What I Want from Life (1934) edited by Edmund George Cousins, p. 108
Context: I don’t know what I want.
Nobody knows — or if they do, they don’t know for long. I mean, you don’t want the same thing long enough for it to be What You Want From Life in capital letters.
Well, maybe some people do. Maybe there's a few simple folks — or maybe a few million, I don't know — who fix their hearts, and their minds, and their everlasting souls on a thing, and keep on all their lives hoping for it. Living for it. Wanting It From Life.
But these are the people who never get it.

Michael Moorcock photo

“I have never had trouble with conflicting interpretations of my work. Once the story is published, it belongs to the reader.”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Introduction (p. viii)
The Wrecks of Time aka The Rituals of Infinity (1967)

“At this point in my life, I don’t worry about telling a literary story or the right story; I tell the story I want to tell, the story that makes me feel alive, the questions I want to answer.”

Amulya Malladi (1974) Indian writer

On not caring about what other people think about her writing in “An Interview with Amulya Malladi” http://jaggerylit.com/an-interview-with-amulya-malladi/ in Jaggery

Samanta Schweblin photo

“In the moment you decide to publish, you hand them off. But it’s interesting how certain stories have remained present—how some were published over and over in different languages, which meant they always seemed close by, and I would change little things here or there.”

Samanta Schweblin (1978) Argentine writer

On her work being translated into several languages in “Samanta Schweblin: There’s No Place Like Home, Including Home Itself” https://lithub.com/samanta-schweblin-theres-no-place-like-home-including-home-itself/ in LitHub (2019 Jan 15)

Benjamin Zephaniah photo

“When I start, I have a story that tends to have a lesson to be learnt. A lot of the time my novels are called novels for young adults and I think one of the reasons they are popular with young adults is because they read them and understand it…”

Benjamin Zephaniah (1958) English poet and author

On the appeal of his writings in “Interview | Benjamin Zephaniah” https://www.thelondonmagazine.org/interview-benjamin-zephaniah/ in the London Magazine (2018 Mar 5)

“I came into DreamWorks looking to direct. I was hoping to go through story as a way toward directing, because that’s how it worked at Disney, story people became heads of story, and heads of story became directors. And they said, ‘Right now we don’t have a lot of story, but we have visual development,’ and I said, ‘Good, I paint!”

Vicky Jenson (1960) American animator

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Richard Halliburton photo

“Halliburton, Richard. (1942). Richard Halliburton: His Story of His Life's Adventure, As told in Letters to his Mother and Father. Garden City, New York: Garden City Publishing Co. (Original work published 1940 by Bobbs-Merrill Co.)”

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