Narrative Non Fiction Quotes

#1. As a reader, I notice political views regardless of whether or not the book is fiction. What annoys me is when said views do nothing to advance the narrative.

Jen Lancaster

#2. At DePauw, I was teaching writing and fiction. The things I wanted to teach, more than anything else, were form and theory of the novel, of narrative. I liked those classes.

Nic Pizzolatto

#3. Fiction is risky for writers also in that the process of making certain books, of shaping certain narratives, leaves scars and marks on your inner life.

Chris Abani

#4. The fact that the site of narrative is an ideal topos disqualifies neither pornography nor science fiction from being literature. Such

Georges Bataille

#5. There are two facts that all children need to disprove sooner or later; mother and father. If you go on believing in the fiction of your own parents, it is difficult to construct any narrative of your own.

Jeanette Winterson

#6. Everything becomes a story and ends up drifting about in the same sphere, and then it's hard to differentiate between what really happened and what is pure invention. Everything becomes a narrative and sounds fictitious even if it's true.

Javier Marias

#7. There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.

E.L. Doctorow

#8. For some reason, notwithstanding the alienation and utter rejection, I consider myself a global citizen. They say misery calls for company and I've always been a man of funerals. The companion of the misfortunate, until they are not!

Asaad Almohammad

#9. I don't know if it's good or bad, but when I first started writing I imitated the narrative thrust of a movie. And as I worked, I learned what you can do in fiction that you can't do in movies, and vice-versa.

Kevin Wilson

#10. The folktale world is oriented positively toward its protagonist; a folktale is defined by the hero's triumph: magic weapons and helpers are, with the necessary narrative retardation, at his beck and call.

Darko Suvin

#11. Escaping into the fantasy of intellectual investigation or narrative story telling makes me feel hopeful. That too is a fiction, but one that makes me feel good sometimes.

Andrew Neel

#12. As I read more and more fairy tales as an adult, I found massive collusion between their 'subjects' and those in my fiction: childhood, nature, sexuality, transformation. I realized that it wasn't by accident that I was drawn to their narrative structure and motifs.

Kate Bernheimer

#13. Narrative secrets are not the same as human mysteries, a lesson that novelists seem fates to forget, again and again; the former quickly confess themselves, and fall silent, while the true mysteries go on speaking.

James Wood

#14. Nonfiction is both easier and harder to write than fiction. It's easier because the facts are already laid out before you, and there is already a narrative arc. What makes it harder is that you are not free to use your imagination and creativity to fill in any missing gaps within the story.

Amy Bloom

#15. My view of an excellent novel was probably set in the golden age of fiction in the 19th century: narrative, character and voice are of equal importance.

Joanna Trollope

#16. I was writing fiction steadily, but I found that the stark determinisms of code were a welcome relief from the ambiguities of literary narrative.

Vikram Chandra

#17. I've always felt that no one understands why some books of non-fiction endure and some don't, because there's not much understanding among many non-fiction writers that the narrative is terribly important.

Robert Caro

#18. If the memoirist is borrowing narrative techniques from fiction, shouldn't the novelist borrow a few tricks from successful non-fiction?

Darin Strauss

#19. I think that narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verite is film in its purest form.

George Hickenlooper

#20. What happens when you don't know the truth but you can't believe the lies, when you can't find a way--through fact or fiction--to give meaning to your own existence? Without a narrative for your own life, do you ever really exist at all?

Maria Goodin

#21. THE COLLECTED SHORT FICTION OF ORSON SCOTT CARD Experience Card's full versatility, from science fiction to fantasy, from traditional narrative poetry to modern experimental fiction.

Orson Scott Card

#22. The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction.

Sara Sheridan

#23. I think what makes compelling fiction or cinema is when you're basically taking the most intense moments of experience and you're creating a song or a narrative out of it.

David O. Russell

#24. Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.
[Ten rules for writing fiction (The Guardian, 20 February 2010)]

Helen Dunmore

#25. And I sense it was a rather constructed, almost half narrative fiction film in some ways. A lot of it was staged and manipulated to get those things in there that I knew to be strong.

Terry Zwigoff

#26. In New York and L.A., there is sort of that silent competition to be on the cutting edge of something. You end up having a conversation with how the world receives your work, especially if you are writing narrative, not fiction. Sometimes it is an awkward conversation. It's like group therapy.

Sloane Crosley

#27. Fiction serves a noble purpose, to oust secrecy, to obliterate shame, to use narrative as a blessed valve to relieve the awful pressure of the pent-up, unspoken pain of existence

Donal Ryan

#28. What fiction and art can do, particularly narrative art, is construct consciousness - in a sense, we have to do it for the first time, every time.

Aleksandar Hemon

#29. More people pay attention to fiction and to narrative than pay attention to journalism. That's quite sad. More people pay attention to television than to prose. That's equally sad, if not more so.

David Simon

#30. Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open
the only way to stop the story running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.

Jeanette Winterson

#31. Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.

Jane Rule

#32. Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'

Kate Atkinson

#33. Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction.

W.E.B. Du Bois

#34. I grew up not reading fiction; I watched movies and read comic books, and one of the ways I taught myself to think about narrative was through film.

Kevin Wilson

#35. Ida was a natural historian who knew how to throw in enough fiction to keep up dramtic tension. And she was replete with details, like a big fat colorful nineteenth-century historical novel, inching forward slowly ... Ida's narrative line, like her waistline, was ample.

Marissa Piesman

#36. Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. This is especially important for historical fiction. When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that's the point to step back and fill in the details of their world.

Hilary Mantel

#37. Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking a novel's length, satisfies the reader.

Ron Rash

#38. If there was no risk, it wouldn't be art. It wouldn't be worth making. There is risk even in a fairy tale. Fiction is closest to pure narrative, and pure narrative is simply the logic we try to impose on an ever-changing reality.

Chris Abani