Top 100 Non Fiction Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. I'm an avid reader. Novels, non-fiction, comics, it doesn't matter. Best way in the world to feed your head.
Reid Scott
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. In every truth there is non-truth, in every fiction there is non-fiction.
Thomas H. Ward
#7. 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
#8. I'm a reluctant writer of non-fiction, in part because I don't really feel qualified.
William Gibson
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. The writing talent of Edinburgh is textured - we have poets, novelists, non-fiction writers, dramatists and more.
Sara Sheridan
#12. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. I'm very strict in my belief that non-fiction should be truthful, and fiction is for invented narratives.
Darin Strauss
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. Chinese readers are buying books in translation, particularly non-fiction about China, in large numbers.
Evan Osnos
#22. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Don't make a big distinction between fiction and non-fiction. These are arbitrary distinctions ...
Farley Mowat
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. Non fiction? Non fiction?! Listen, reality is what got me into this mess in the first place.
Justin Alcala
#34. 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
#35. Before Truman Capote, journalism and non-fiction weren't taken very seriously.
Gerald Clarke
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. There is, in my mind, no higher compliment to pay a non-fiction book than to say it reads like a novel.
Jon Weisman
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.
V.S. Naipaul
#50. His theory was that non-fiction could be as artful as fiction.
Gerald Clarke
#51. 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
#52. You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.
Ethan Canin
#53. There's no such thing as fiction or imagination, as they're merely non-fiction manifestations in the wrong parallel universe.
Daniel Marques
#54. It's funny because when I was growing up, I was really into science fiction and fantasy as a kid. And, when I first became a screenwriter, I ended up really just doing historical drama and non-fiction based stuff, like Band of Brothers and stuff that didn't get made, but was also non-fiction.
John Orloff
#55. Visit any bookshop in Europe, and the shelves are filled with English novels and non-fiction books in translation - while British bookshops stock mainly English and American works.
Kate Williams
#56. There's a fine line between fiction and non-fiction and I think I snorted it somewhere in 1979
Kinky Friedman
#57. Jesmyn Ward returns to the world of her first two books, but here in the mode of non-fiction. A clear-eyed witness to the harrowing stories of 'men we reaped,' she quickens the dead and brings them, vividly alive again. An eloquent, grief-steeped account.
Nicholas Delbanco
#58. I spend most of my time reading non-fiction of all sorts. Then poetry. Then fiction to blurb. Then fiction I want to read.
Jim Shepard
#59. Reading a non-fiction book is like a religious experience.
Rachel Perry
#60. I like to read really good books - anything that's really great, whether it's fiction, non-fiction, how-to, or whatever.
Tyler Hilton
#62. I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.
Penelope Lively
#63. I've read pretty broadly on the Holocaust - both fiction and non-fiction - and to me, 'The Lost Wife' is one of the best. The horrors of war serve as a backdrop to a love affair that spans a lifetime, and that love story stayed with me long after I put down the book.
Lauren Weisberger
#64. I honestly believe that everything I know about the writing of non-fiction (or writing) could be engraved on the head of a pin with a garden hoe ...
M.F.K. Fisher
#65. I do, however, feel reasonably strongly the sense that the job of a piece of argumentative scholarly non-fiction is not the same as the job of a piece of fiction.
China Mieville
#66. One of the fantastic things about books, fiction or non-fiction, is the way they give you a chance to look into different lives.
Gillian Cross
#67. Without books we're a very uneducated society. Think of the places books have taken us, the people we've been introduced to (fiction or non-fiction) and how books have allowed us to broaden our vocabulary.
Tom Robinson
#68. Life is an interpretation of a series of facts, and that interpretation is really what life is about. So the division between non-fiction and fiction has a certain logic, but it's a very limited one. And by and large, it isn't helpful.
Yann Martel
#69. 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
#70. The idea of a flip book still really appeals to me. That idea of fiction and non-fiction.
Yann Martel
#71. I do teach fiction and non-fiction, and usually I'm interested in works that confuse genre, but I'm very new to teaching creative writing, I don't have an MFA, or a PhD, I tend to approach it just through my own practice.
Kate Zambreno
#72. It's true that I don't rearrange that much in the fiction, but I feel if you change even one name or the order of one event then you have to call it fiction or you get all the credits of non-fiction without paying the price.
Nicholson Baker
#73. There's nothing quite as exciting or moving as the very finest literary non-fiction.
Catherine Jinks
#74. Everyone has secrets. Fiction allows people to see themselves in characters, to discover healing and truth when their 'reputation' or shame won't let them pick up a non-fiction book. They can watch characters struggle, then experience the truth that sets them free.
Susan May Warren
#75. I like writing non-fiction - and when you pick a [non-fiction] subject, it saves you the hassle of coming up with a plot.
Richard Hell
#76. History - the non-fiction version - must inform the fiction to make it truthful; too much of it and your genres are colliding.
Jon Weisman
#77. I think fiction can help us find everything. You know, I think that in fiction you can say things and in a way be truer than you can be in real life and truer than you can be in non-fiction. There's an accuracy to fiction that people don't really talk about - an emotional accuracy.
A.M. Homes
#78. In writing non-fiction about people who are living, you are always walking a fine line, carrying a burden to be fair that, in my opinion, should always be there.
Jonathan Coleman
#79. When you write non-fiction, you sit down at your desk with a pile of notebooks, newspaper clippings, and books and you research and put a book together the way you would a jigsaw puzzle.
Janine Di Giovanni
#80. I'm not writing non-fiction. I don't feel anything about me as a kid was unique. Except that I had more interest in being alone and using my imagination.
John Irving
#81. I've just finished reading 'The Second Plane,' and I think it's some of the best non-fiction I've ever read.
M. J. Hyland
#82. The primary goal of publishing general fiction and non-fiction was never profit - though profit was essential to stay in the game. Publishing is a vocation in which the work is its own reward, an insufficient goal for today's conglomerates.
Jason Epstein
#83. A book is a story, even if it's non-fiction, and once I've read it, I have the story with me inside my head always.
Sara Sheridan
#84. I lay off a lot modern fiction and only rely on living writers for non-fiction work.
Henry Rollins
#85. All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.
Richard Hughes
#86. Jessica DuLong's elegantly written "My River Chronicles" brings the past of the Hudson River into the vivid present, and carries forward the craft of literary non-fiction with grace and energy.
Gay Talese
#87. For my purpose, the non-fiction form of abstract knowledge doesn't interest me; the final, applied form of fiction, of story, does.
Ayn Rand
#88. Non-fiction is to theory as fiction is to experience.
Joyce Rachelle
#89. In high school, I was very active in extracurricular activities such as art, theatre, and choir. I also wrote for the school newspaper, but not regularly, because I never liked writing non-fiction very much.
Meg Cabot
#90. The non-fiction bestseller lists frequently prove that we all want to know more about everything, even if we didn't know that we wanted to know - we're just waiting for the right person to come along and tell us about it.
Nick Hornby
#91. I mainly read non-fiction, and that's probably because I have a huge amount of insecurity about my lack of education and the things I don't know.
Steve Earle
#92. See, I have no journalism in my background, so I wasn't practised at research or writing non-fiction, nor at handling the truth in a journalistic way. Journalists know when to call a halt and write something, but I kept on looking for answers.
John Sladek
#93. Non-fiction about personal subjects is going to attract more user comments than a foreign correspondent writing from Syria - unfortunately.
Meghan Daum
#94. What I like about non-fiction is that it covers such a huge territory. The best non-fiction is also creative.
Tracy Kidder
#95. Fiction described reality better than non-fiction.
Tommy Wallach
#96. Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college.
Jennifer Weiner
#97. I'm a huge historical fiction and non-fiction fan.
Gale Anne Hurd
#98. I read very widely, both non-fiction and fiction, so I don't think there's a single writer who influences me.
Peter Benchley
#99. I was that weird kid that checked out all of the non-fiction paranormal studies books from the library. I've always been fascinated by the supernatural, particularly movies and TV shows that manage to blend humor with the horror - 'Supernatural', 'Buffy', 'Angel.'
Molly Harper
#100. The subject for a lot of non-fiction is very emotional, but if you read it, it's the most boring, dry stuff. I wanted 'Torn Apart' to be extremely accessible and readable.
James Patterson
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