Short stories consume you faster. They're connected to brevity. With the short story, you are up against mortality. I know how tough they are as a fo….

We all know our dates of birth but . . . every year there is another date that we pass over without knowing what it is but it is just as important it….

All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other..

Books mean all possibilities. They mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst and living to your full. They mean everything..

remember you must live. remember you most love. remainder you mist leaf..

To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better..

I had a job, I got ill, I left the job to get better, and while I was getting better, I wrote some stories. I sent them to some publishers and the fi….

Oh. To be filled with goodness then shattered by goodness, so beautifully mosaically fragmented by such shocking goodness..

Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen..

Tonight I can smell the season the way it's usually only possible to at the very first moments of its return, before you're used to it, when you've f….

And it was always the stories that needed the telling that gave us the rope we could cross any river with. They balanced us high above any crevasse. ….

Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn’t there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superflu….

There are things that can't be said, because it's hard to have to know them..

Every great narrative is at least two narratives, if not more - the thing that is on the surface and then the things underneath which are invisible..

Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?.

The whole point is, we can forget. It’s important that we forget some things. Otherwise we’d go round the world carrying a hodload of stuff we just d….

You never know if you're a writer. You can't trust it. If you woke up and said, "I'm a writer," it would be gone. You wouldn't see anything for miles….

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels..

I want to be bored. But I can't. But I really don't want to be this thing that I'm having to be instead of being bored..

Stella Duffy is a writer who never lets you down..

We'd never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've read a book after reading it just once..