Quote

I'll give you the whole secret to short story writing. Here it is. Rule 1: Write stories that please yourself. There is no Rule 2.

O. Henry

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

O. Henry
Age: 47 †
Born: 1862
Born: September 11
Died: 1910
Died: June 5
Journalist
Writer
Greensboro
North Carolina
William Sydney Porter
Olivier Henry
Oliver Henry
Write
Stories
Give
Insightful
Whole
Rule
Giving
Short
Writing
Please
Secret
Story

More quotes by O. Henry

Image
Most wonderful of all are words, and how they make friends one with another.
O. Henry
Image
Bohemia is nothing more than the little country in which you do not live. If you try to obtain citizenship in it, at once the court and retinue pack the royal archives and treasure and move away beyond the hills.
O. Henry
Image
You can't appreciate home till you've left it, money till it's spent, your wife till she's joined a woman's club, nor Old Glory till you see it hanging on a broomstick on the shanty of a consul in a foreign town.
O. Henry
Image
A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience.
O. Henry
Image
This fair but pitiless city of Manhattan was without a soul ... its inhabitants were manikins moved by wires and springs.
O. Henry
Image
There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl.
O. Henry
Image
Write what you like there is no other rule.
O. Henry
Image
Men to whom life had appeared as a reversible coat - seamy on both sides.
O. Henry
Image
If you can't write a story that pleases yourself, you will never please the public. But in writing the story forget the public.
O. Henry
Image
No friendship is an accident.
O. Henry
Image
There is this difference between the grief of youth and that of old age youth's burden is lightened by as much of it as another shares old age may give and give, but the sorrow remains the same.
O. Henry
Image
A burglar who respects his art always takes his time before taking anything else.
O. Henry
Image
Women's weapon, water-drops.
O. Henry
Image
Of habit, the power that keeps the earth from flying to pieces though there is some silly theory of gravitation.
O. Henry
Image
It'll be a great place if they ever finish it.
O. Henry
Image
I've got some of my best yarns from park benches, lamp posts and newspaper stands.
O. Henry
Image
In the Big City a man will disappear with the suddenness and completeness of the flame of a candle that is blown out.
O. Henry
Image
Broadway - the great sluice that washes out the dust of the gold-mines of Gotham.
O. Henry
Image
Each of us, when our day's work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster à la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves.
O. Henry
Image
History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women.
O. Henry