Some of my favorite writer quotes (especially useful for thinking about good flash fiction)...

"The rule of the writer is not to say what we can all say but what we are unable to say." (Anais Nin)
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"One who reads one hundred poets sounds like one hundred poets. One who reads a thousand poets sounds like oneself." (Chinese axiom)
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"Thus we respect the poet who observes no more than we do and conceives it no more profoundly than we should, if only he formulates it better than we could; we respect him still more if he does this better than most poets have. We respect still more the poet who observes more than we do, and still more the poet who feels or conceives more than we; and in proportion as the performance surpasses such standards, our respect increases. We range from the slightest esteem to the greatest awe and wonder according as he does surpass such standards; let him fall below them, and our feelings descend as far as utter contempt. We measure performance as against what it seems impossible anyone should have done; against what only the fine artist could have done; against what most artists could do, what most people could do, what anyone could have done, what only a fool would have done." (Elder Olson, from an article titled "The Nature of the Poet" from A Casebook on Dylan Thomas)
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"Creating stories is a special craft-- a special way of capturing reality on the page. It feels real, but it isn't. You can't just break off a piece of reality and stick it on the page. It won't work. It won't work because fiction is concentrated, heightened, intensified reality. It's the essence of reality. All reality doesn't contain such essence or truth, but all fiction must. You, the author, must create it. So even though you already have everything you need, you need to learn how to use it. That's craft. That's technique...." (Jerry Cleaver, Immediate Fiction: A Complete Writing Course. New York: St. Martin's, 2002)
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Flash/Sudden/Micro Fiction continues to grow in reader popularity.

Two new Flash/ Sudden anthologies are available and they are just as excellent as the earlier anthologies. One is New Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories from America and Beyond, edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007.) Some of the authors included are Tobias Wolff, Sam Shepard, Aimee Bender, Nadine Gordimer, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Olen Butler, Pia Z. Ehrhardt, Peter Markus, Deb Olin Unferth, and many others. Outstanding reading, as usual.

The other anthology is from the same editors as above and is titled FlashFiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories (New York: W.W. Norton., 2007). Some of the authors include Paul Theroux, Alison Townsend, Ron Carlson, Lydia Davis, Dave Eggers, Donald Hall, Grace Paley, Robert Coover, Barbara Jacksha, Utahna Faith (Jacksha and Faith are two writers I've workedwith for years in my flash fiction workshop), Amy Hempel, Etgar Keret, Pamela Painter, Bruce Holland Rogers, Mark Budman, and many other fine writers.

Readers who love literary flash fiction will no doubt love these anthologies too.