I love the short story: I love its flexibility, its distillation of language, the pressure it exerts on the moment. A story demands that the reader look closely. And yet, despite the intensity and constraints, a story can be surprisingly capacious…

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.

I grew up loving and respecting short stories. They seemed to me to be the purest and most perfect things people could make: not a word wasted, in the best of them.

I’ve always been very interested in the short story. Compared to the often exhausting world of the novel, the short story offers a quicker reward, and there’s something appealing about its greater spontaneity…

novels certainly have their charms, but the most elegant creation in the prose universe is a short story. Master the short story and you'll have mastered the world,

All the way from Maugham and de Maupassant and Chekhov to Ring Lardner the short story has served to portray the characteristics, the habits, the manners, the morals, the emotions of a nation, a whole people. Certainly I knew no such highfalutin arguments as these when first I began to write short stories. I wrote short stories for the same reason that a child has who begins to walk after he has learned to stand up and to balance himself. It was for me the next natural step following newspaper reporting. I still think it is one of the most exhilarating and the most difficult forms of the writing art. When a reader says, "Oh, only a short story!" he has me to fight. There is something about the pace of the short story that catches the tempo of this country. If it is written with sincerity and skill it portrays a mood, a character, a background, or a situation. Sometimes it is not only typically American, it is universal in its feeling; sometimes its inherent truth is not a thing of the month, but of the years. When this is true, that short story is as genuinely a classic as any novel or play or piece of music.

I wrote a lot of short stories. I’m still interested in this form and I collect ideas for stories on an ongoing basis, even though I’ve recently developed as a novelist. But my fascination with storytelling doesn’t end. I believe it is a highly sublime, very difficult literary form. Few writers can write a good short story. Sometimes I think it’s easier to write a novel than a short story with a good solid ending. I appreciate this form very much as a reader, too; I’ve loved collections, anthologies of stories since I was a child.

The construction of short stories calls for a markedly different set of mind than work on a novel, and for me short stories are at once more interesting and more difficult to write than longer work. The comparative brevity of the story dictates more economical and accurate use of words and images, a limited palette of events, fewer characters, tighter dialogue, strong title and punctuation that works to move the story forward. If the writer is trying to illustrate a particular period or place, a collection of short stories is a good way to take the reader inside a house of windows, each opening onto different but related views—a kind of flip book of place, time and manners.

Short stories are the form of youth. You must have a plot, a situation, and distinctive characters. You take this and throw it away in a few thousand words when it could be made into a novel. That is very unthrifty, and it is not fair to the characters. They need more space.

…People who know about these things say that the short story is the most challenging form, much more so than the novel, because of the precision required; sometimes you have to achieve as much as a novel in a much shorter space and period of time. Had I known that it was the most difficult of forms, I probably would not have started with the short story…

(about writing short stories) It leaves so much room for the reader to come in and take an active role. A great collection of short stories is like walking through a brilliant exhibit. It changes you, but you have to be open to the change.

(Tell us about your favorite short story.) There are too many to be tempted to isolate only one, so here are five: “Lighea” (sometimes titled “The Professor and the Mermaid”), by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa; “My Quarrel With Hersh Rasseyner,” by Chaim Grade; Chekhov’s “Ward Six”; Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych”; James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” (everyone’s autobiography).

Short stories are mostly read by people who want to write short stories.

By the term short story I mean the recital of a destiny which is represented in a single incident; by anecdote the recital of a single incident which illumines an entire destiny.