Top 100 Non Fiction Quotes
#2. I tend to listen to music more than I read. I need to get into reading a bit more. The stuff I tend to read is usually non-fiction books more than fiction, but I've been trying to power my way through Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment,' and I do enjoy it.
Isaac Hempstead-Wright
#3. That was par for the course but I also found that commissions were being canceled and in fact I considered this directly libelous - I write biographies for a living as well as being a journalist - for a non fiction book to be called fiction from beginning to end.
Anthony Holden
#4. I'm an avid reader. Novels, non-fiction, comics, it doesn't matter. Best way in the world to feed your head.
Reid Scott
#5. Historians turning their hands to fiction are all the rage. Since Alison Weir led the way in 2006, an ever-growing number of established non-fiction writers - Giles Milton, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Harry Sidebottom, Patrick Bishop, Ian Mortimer and myself included - have written historical novels.
Saul David
#7. Amy Rapp, my producing partner, and I are drawn to character-driven material. We're developing and producing movies and TV, fiction and non-fiction, studio and independent, broadcast and cable, theatre, and web so our slate is really diverse.
Meredith Vieira
#8. The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth.
Criss Jami
#10. In every truth there is non-truth, in every fiction there is non-fiction.
Thomas H. Ward
#11. A non-fiction writer pretty much has the shape of the figure in front of him or her and goes about refining it. A work of non-fiction is not as difficult to write as a work of fiction, but it's not as satisfying in the end.
Chaim Potok
#12. I'm a reluctant writer of non-fiction, in part because I don't really feel qualified.
William Gibson
#13. What most people see is a badge, behind and beyond the badge is what they need to know...the person.
Donna Brown
#15. The challenge in fiction is to write a terrific story. The challenge in journalism is to communicate solid, objective information. The challenge in creative non-fiction is to do it both and to do it well.
Lee Gutkind
#16. Everything bleeds into everything and fiction is just this funny desperate little attempt to staunch the bleeding.
Meghan Lamb
#17. 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
#18. The writing talent of Edinburgh is textured - we have poets, novelists, non-fiction writers, dramatists and more.
Sara Sheridan
#19. When I label something as fiction, people say it's true, and when I label something as non-fiction, people say it is made up. If something is not 100% true, then I label it as fiction. After all, there is no half of a lie, is there?
Robert Black
#20. When shall we pass a day alone? I have had a thousand kisses, for which with my whole soul I thank love - but if you should deny me the thousand and first - 'twould put me to the proof how great a misery I could live through.
John Keats
#22. I have two pairs of reading glasses. One pair is for reading fiction, the other for non-fiction. I've read the Bible twice wearing each pair, and it's the same.
Steven Wright
#23. The difference between an achiever and a loser is,
An achiever never gives up, never settles and lastly never forgets.
Akash Lakhotia
#24. As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography.
Norman Spinrad
#25. I had been working on this series called 'Everything Dies,' and it was basically me doing non-fiction essays, responding to religion and stuff like that, and I really got into this ideas of telling factual stories via comics.
Box Brown
#26. Nice dress," Victoria said.
"Thank you," Perpetua said. "Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?"
Victoria blinked. "Uh, what?
Benjamin R. Smith
#28. I'm very strict in my belief that non-fiction should be truthful, and fiction is for invented narratives.
Darin Strauss
#30. The soul-Self doesn't follow the crowd. It encourages you to speak up when you need to and live by your truth.
Debra Moffitt
#31. Life is way too short, so try to enjoy every minute of it with a sense of humor!
Christina Scalise
#32. The effect of reading literary non-fiction that matters most to me is when the coin drops, and this happens in the company of the great, mercuric, encyclopedic minds: Empson, Kenneth Burke, Northrop Frye.
Paul Fry
#33. It was one of those situations I often find myself in while traveling. Something's said by a stranger I've been randomly thrown into contact with, and I want to say, Listen. I'm with you on most of this, but before we continue, I need to know who you voted for in the last election.
David Sedaris
#34. When you want something, all the Universe conspires to helping you achieve it.
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
Just ask..
Victoria Aldridge Washuk
#35. His life, measured in space and time, will take up a mere few lines, which my ignorance will abbreviate further.
Jorge Luis Borges
#36. I'm a professional non-fiction reader, that's what I do. But in my 20s we had our own vampire and witch moment, courtesy of Anne Rice, whose books I read and loved.
Deborah Harkness
#37. Time in the most powerful thing.
Not money, not power, not hope.
A person can have everything they
desire but without time they are,
all useless.
Akash Lakhotia
#38. Who can know anybody?' said the bookshop owner. 'Every person is like thousands of books. New, reprinting, in stock, out of stock, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, rubbish. The lot. Different every day. One's lucky to be able to put his hand on the one that's wanted, let alone know it.
Russell Hoban
#39. It's all about the spirit. Every man, woman and child should be seen as a spirit first, before anything else. We are all spirits in the first instance.
Andrew Agbonlahor
#40. -Those who never face oppositions always stop at propositions.
-Those who never confront obstacles live with delays and postponements
Ikechukwu Joseph
#41. To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.
James P. Carse
#42. At Harvard, direct cinema was the core of the film department, and most of the students were trying to make socially conscious works, but I was trying to combine fiction and non-fiction to show how our seemingly factual world is constituted through fantasy and stories.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#43. If you read a book that's fiction and you get caught in the characters and the plot, and swept away, really, by the fiction of it - by the non-reality - you sometimes wind up changing your reality as well. Often, when the last page is turned, it will haunt you.
Jodi Picoult
#44. Fear would have told the Wright brothers not to fly. Fear would have told Rosa Parks to change seats. Fear would have told Steve Jobs that people hate touchscreens.
Jon Acuff
#45. You gotta help me get out of here! They're trying to kill me. I'm gonna die. I've got $35,000 missing. Those two women took it. They're trying to kill me. You gotta help me. Cut me loose! Cut me loose!
Jeannie Walker
#46. Chinese readers are buying books in translation, particularly non-fiction about China, in large numbers.
Evan Osnos
#47. I don't believe the inner work ever really ends, and sometimes I'd like to take a vacation.
Debra Moffitt
#48. Fiction is entertaining. Nonfiction is epic.
A.D. Posey
#49. the influence of organised crime reaches into the economy, our politics and everyday life- dongri to dubai
S. Hussain Zaidi
#50. I like reading a lot. Jeffrey Archer and Robert Ludlum are my favourite authors. I love making realistic cinema, so I read non-fiction more.
Madhur Bhandarkar
#53. To my mind, the prose in a non-fiction work that's going to endure has to be of the same quality as the prose in a work of fiction that endures.
Robert Caro
#54. Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.
Arundhati Roy
#55. I thought I was going to write fiction but I fell backwards into non-fiction. It started when I got locked out of two apartments in one day and I told the story to some friends, one of whom worked in the 'Village Voice' and asked me to turn it into an essay.
Sloane Crosley
#56. Because I'm such a creative person, and I've always got my nose in a book, I suppose it was only a matter of time before non-fiction turned into fiction again. But I never consciously set out to become a writer and I never thought I'd be doing the things I'm doing today.
Paul Kane
#57. Don't make a big distinction between fiction and non-fiction. These are arbitrary distinctions ...
Farley Mowat
#58. I felt it burn all the way down my throat and into my stomach. I felt like I was dying.
Jeannie Walker
#59. I'm a novelist, I'm not an activist. I'm not a non-fiction writer, I'm not a journalist. I'm not a foodie, I'm not even really an animal person, or an environmentalist. I did the best I could with this, but it's not who I am.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#60. Science/horror/Non-Fiction/Technology/Music/Games/Space... these are the subjects of future. The other again will develop but not with such speed like these here.
Deyth Banger
#61. I couldn't open up a magazine, you couldn't read a newspaper, you couldn't turn on the TV without hearing about the obesity epidemic in America.
Morgan Spurlock
#62. I'd probably be a super wealthy guy if I had sat around writing songs and getting them placed like everyone else I know. But I write songs about people or after I meet them and they're somewhat biographical - they're fiction but also non-fiction.
Nile Rodgers
#63. I'm omnivorous in my tastes, fiction and non-fiction, always several books on the go, though I'll read a novel in a day or two.
O.R. Melling
#64. Long dismissed as children's stories or 'myths' by Westerners, Australian Aboriginal stories have only recently begun to be taken seriously for what they are: the longest continuous record of historic events and spirituality in the world.
Karl-Erik Sveiby
#65. As a fiction writer I am not always sure where reality ends and non reality begins, when sane thoughts become less than sane, or what is imagination versus undiscovered truth, but ultimately, it is my job to make you as unsure as I am.
Kathryn Mattingly
#66. Non fiction? Non fiction?! Listen, reality is what got me into this mess in the first place.
Justin Alcala
#67. To successfully tell the story, we had to be willing to let people see us as we really were; with all our weaknesses, fears, and imperfections. There are important lessons we learned from the experience that we would not have adequately relayed to the reader if we had been less bold." ~ Duane
Duane & Selena Pannell
#68. Borrow money only for an education that will yield enough of a return in the job market to allow you to pay your loans back.
Kevin Carey
#69. I like to read biographies of authors that I love, like Richard Yates. I also like to see what non-fiction authors are out there. My bible is Something Happened. It's one of the greatest books I've ever read. But if I don't read a Dostoevsky soon I'm going to kill myself.
Richard Lewis
#70. Before Truman Capote, journalism and non-fiction weren't taken very seriously.
Gerald Clarke
#71. I don't write non-fiction because I get bored. Some of my writing is autobiographical, but not the way readers imagine. I use my memory of settings, events and people. I weave history into my stories, but my narratives are made up.
Sefi Atta
#72. What I've always been most interested in is exposing the way stories and fantasies reconstitute our everyday reality. What appears to be non-fiction is not only totally mysterious, unfathomable, and strange when you really look at what it is.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#73. Transformation of thought is the realization of unity and mutual interdependence of all beings and things of the world. The experience that all beings and things, unseen, invisible and visible, are interrelated and inseparable, constitute different forms of single and multi-dimensional world
Alexis Karpouzos
#74. I never knew before, what such a love as you have made me feel, was; I did not believe in it; my Fancy was afraid of it, lest it should burn me up. But if you will fully love me, though there may be some fire, 'twill not be more than we can bear when moistened and bedewed with Pleasures.
John Keats
#75. There is a physics to the world, which non-fiction has a contract to stand in awe of, otherwise it becomes completely self-centered and ego-driven, which is the death of a memoir.
Nick Flynn
#76. Had a big trial. It was like an Errol Flynn movie.
Jeannie Walker
#77. I read a lot; fiction and non-fiction are the mediums I find most edifying and inspiring. I watch movies and listen to music and take lots and lots of walks. Nature is a nice reset button for me, it's how I get a lot of thinking done.
Carrie Brownstein
#78. The Bible is a book of Science. Secular Humanism is a religion of mythology.
Michael J. Findley
#79. Dream sets us on fire.
Dream gives us direction.
Dream betters our potential.
Dream helps us prioritize.
Dream adds value to our work and
life.
Dream colors our future.
Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
#81. As strange as this may sound, I very seldom read fiction. Because my novels require so much research, almost everything I read is non - fiction - histories, biographies, translations of ancient texts..
Dan Brown
#83. There is, in my mind, no higher compliment to pay a non-fiction book than to say it reads like a novel.
Jon Weisman
#84. Expand the definition of 'reading' to include non-fiction, humor, graphic novels, magazines, action adventure, and, yes, even websites. It's the pleasure of reading that counts; the focus will naturally broaden. A boy won't read shark books forever.
Jon Scieszka
#85. History will be kind to me for I have written it. Winston Churchill
Ron Mayes
#86. My house is filled with books, most of which I have read, some of which I intend to eventually get to. I'm always reading at least one work of fiction and one work of non-fiction simultaneously. Whatever mood I'm in, there's always a book nearby to suit it.
Rachel Nichols
#87. I cannot say how strongly I object to people using other people's writing as research. Research is non-fiction, especially for horror, fantasy, science fiction. Do not take your research from other people's fiction. Just don't.
Laurell K. Hamilton
#88. Good memory skill is the offspring of good focus. If you find yourself becoming a little forgetful, it is probably not because there is something wrong with your brain. Rather, it is simply because your mind is too cluttered to allow things to stick.
Ilchi Lee
#89. I have been tossing around the idea of writing some non-fiction. Maybe a collection of short stories about my experience being a mom and how not to be perfect.
Melissa Peterman
#90. I was looking to do something non-fiction because I had done a strip, 'My Mom Was a Schizophrenic.' I really enjoyed the process of doing that strip, despite its subject matter. To do it I'd had to do a lot of research and reading and I figured I'd like to do that again.
Chester Brown
#91. I love reading all kinds of books. I usually have about ten books going at any one time - books about the past, the present, novels, non-fiction, poetry, mythology, religion, etc. Reading is my favorite thing to do.
Mary Pope Osborne
#92. Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?
Tanith Lee
#93. Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.
V.S. Naipaul
#94. Writing is a psychological process. It is the process of taking what is in your mind and sharing it with others.
Gudjon Bergmann
#95. His theory was that non-fiction could be as artful as fiction.
Gerald Clarke
#96. The people who are writing online and the people in my genre of creative non-fiction exert a great deal more freedom that journalists are allowed to exert in their day-to-day work.
Lee Gutkind
#97. When push comes to shove we can afford to lose an arm or a leg, but I am operating on peoples thoughts and feelings... and if something goes wrong I can destroy that persons character... forever.
Henry Marsh
#98. Behind the door was where bad things happen. No matter how many blankets I used or extra pairs of panties I wore. None of it mattered. The monster always came. His face obscured in the shadows, partially hidden behind the cloak rack. Hot breath breathing over my face as soon as I closed my eyes.
Hannah Baston
#99. Well now," the dragon says to her in a voice like rolling thunder, "who are you really here to save?
Patti Larsen
#100. You need only one thing in the world. It is not money. It is not fame. It is not even food. All you need in the world is hope. As long as you have that, you have everything. This is your birthright that you should never lose. If you keep hope, all your other necessities will come soon enough.
Ilchi Lee
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