When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me.
William FaulknerRead
Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Short stories require precise language and structure, while novels allow for more flexibility.
William Faulkner emphasizes the significance of brevity and precision in short stories compared to novels. He highlights that due to the limited space in a short story, every word must be chosen with care, demanding a higher level of craftsmanship and artistry. In contrast, novels provide more leeway for less careful writing, as they have a wider scope for storytelling.
Themes
Short StoryNovelPrecisionWritingCreativity
In practice
Example use cases
In a writing workshop, I might use this quote to discuss the importance of word choice in short stories.
More from William Faulkner
All quotes →I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
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When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not be old enough to desire the fruits of it...his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it...
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Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.
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He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
William FaulknerRead
Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.
William FaulknerRead
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