Thomas McGuane Quotes

When I was starting out, I did not do short fiction well, because I kept wanting to write books.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.

A novel is a big thing. It's difficult to hold the whole story in your mind, especially when you've finished a first draft and are still giddy from the flow of creative juices.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

'The Secret Life of Bees' was my first novel, so I had no process. I was flying by the seat of my pants, as they say, trying to understand how I, as a novelist, would work with story.

Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.

Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories.

I write short stories when a little idea occurs to me, that I know isn't a part of a novel that will stand by itself and should be concentrated.

I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.

To be interested in short stories, you have to be interested in fiction as an art form.

I feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when writing a novel, and short stories are more about instant gratification.

In non-fiction, I found John Gardner's two writing books to be tremendously helpful.

You have to be kind of clued into them, they are a world of their own, and most people find them disappointing because the best short stories are not constructed like novels.

After 20 years of writing academic prose and lectures, it seems very familiar and straightforward to me. Writing a novel for the first time, I was reminded of just how difficult it is to figure out how to get this stuff done when you don't really know what you're doing.

I wanted to learn about the worlds I wanted to write about in fiction.

I often say flippantly that the short story is... shorter; you can be done with it more easily. It's much less of a commitment of time and energy than a big project like a novel or long nonfiction book.

When you write a novel you have to live with the characters for a long time. So I prefer short stories. I never wrote anything more than 250 pages.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, 'Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth.'

The great pleasure for me in writing short stories is the fierce, elegant challenge.

I'm writing exactly the kinds of books I like to write. And they're the kinds of books I like to read. They're popular commercial fiction. That's what they are.