Nonfiction Book Quotes

#1. Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.

Barbara Kingsolver

#2. The single characteristic that most makes a difference in the success of an article or nonfiction book is the author's courage in revealing normally unspoken things about himself or his society. It takes guts to be a writer

Sol Stein

#3. Every time I write a nonfiction book I get sued.

Joseph Wambaugh

#4. I coauthored my first nonfiction book by the time I was 25. I have been involved in nonfiction documentaries, newspapers, TV and internet since that time.

Julian Assange

#5. In college, I wrote newspaper articles and songs. Then, on my 21st birthday, I sold my first book. It was a nonfiction book about women pirates - 'Pirates in Petticoats.' After that, I was a book writer for good.

Jane Yolen

#6. What I'm really interested in, as a reader and as a writer, is the idea of the nonfiction book that is not defined by its content, by its "about"-ness. Where you read it irrespective of whether you're interested in the subject.

Geoff Dyer

#7. When I'm writing fiction I'm thinking, God, this is so hard - I have to make all this stuff up! I wish I were writing a nonfiction book where all the facts are laid out and I don't have to be so much at sea.

Douglas Preston

#8. There's always a slight tension when you sell a book to Hollywood, especially a nonfiction book. The author wants his story told intact; the nonfiction author wants it told accurately.

Bryan Burrough

#9. the top 10% of people who buy a nonfiction book.

Anthony Robbins

#10. I'm working on a nonfiction book on Nepal and a novel about diasporas.

Louise Brown

#11. Writing a nonfiction book should primarily be about establishing credibility and authority in a specific domain.

Hassan Osman

#12. My favourite all-time work of fiction: Lord of the Rings. My favourite all-time nonfiction book: Guns, Germs, and Steel. Ask me again next week, you'll get a different answer.

Orson Scott Card

#13. I often say flippantly that the short story is ... shorter; you can be done with it more easily. It's much less of a commitment of time and energy than a big project like a novel or long nonfiction book.

Bobbie Ann Mason

#14. Everyone writes the book he or she loves to read. Great authors write the books others love to read.

Chuck Miceli

#15. It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.

Annie Dillard

#16. I often read nonfiction with a pencil in hand. I love the feel, the smell, the design, the weight of a book, but I also enjoy the convenience of my Kindle - for travel and for procuring a book in seconds.

Drew Gilpin Faust

#17. I don't read for amusement, I read for enlightenment. I do a lot of reviewing, so I have a steady assignment of reading. I'm also a judge for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which gives awards to literature and nonfiction.

Joyce Carol Oates

#18. Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.
(Acceptance speech, National Book Award 2010 (Nonfiction), November 17, 2010)

Patti Smith

#19. Don't ignore or drive away your God sent Davids for you will need them when the life threatening giant Goliaths go on rampage in your life

Ikechukwu Joseph

#20. Politically I also don't believe anymore that we can only have one voice to a story, it's like having one radio station to represent a country. You want the politics of any complicated situation to be complicated in a book of fiction or nonfiction.

Michael Ondaatje

#21. When you start reading nonfiction books about piracy, you realize that it's actually just a history of desperate people.

Daniel Handler

#22. Usually I read several books at a time - old books, new books, fiction, nonfiction, verse, anything - and when the bedside heap of a dozen volumes or so has dwindled to two or three, which generally happens by the end of one week, I accumulate another pile.

Vladimir Nabokov

#23. Life is truly a matter of choices, reactions, and actions...each and every choice is governed by our reactions which in turn affect our actions and consequently the future turn of events

Kapil Kumar Bhaskar

#24. I've allowed some of these points to stand, because this is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell. But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story.

Tobias Wolff

#25. I do 30 to 40 books a year, so it's a fair amount of reading. Back and forth between nonfiction and fiction. I usually have three or four things that are open on my desk, on my bed, on audiobook in the car.

James Patterson

#26. I do think that calling a book nonfiction affirms a kind of responsibility to an attempt at truth.

Garth Greenwell

#27. You have to get Real, to get Healed.

Thakore Coco O'Neal

#28. Across the bottom of the last page of many a book is written 'Explicit, Deo Gratias ('Finished, thank god')...Books are kept not on open shelves, but in locked chests.

Joseph Gies

#29. Whenever you have two characters in a book, whether it's a novel or nonfiction, you run the risk that the reader is going to like one more than the other. They're going to read one chapter and say, 'I can't wait to get back to the other guy.'

Mitch Albom

#30. I have three libraries. As a gift, a friend alphabetized and organized my main library of novels, history books, and nonfiction. Then I have a photo-book collection. Then there's this nearly whole room of my childhood books. I've also got cookbooks and a big collection of horse-related books.

Sally Mann

#31. Every time I get through the work on a book of nonfiction, I say I'll never do it again; it takes so much out of you.

Dave Eggers

#32. I give this book 5 Stars and highly recommend it to all fiction, nonfiction, and poetry writers, aspiring writers, bloggers or journalists.

Sunny

#33. Life is way too short, so try to enjoy every minute of it with a sense of humor!

Christina Scalise

#34. Most of the time our inner voice tries to guide us to 'Truth' but we, out of our own vested interests, wish to continue living in our own self-created illusions because it suits our purpose or fulfils our needs.

Kapil Kumar Bhaskar

#35. Robert Mapplethorpe asked me to write our story the day before he died. I had never written a book of nonfiction, and so it took me almost two decades to write that book.

Patti Smith