Top 29 Nonfiction Novel Quotes
#1. I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.
Leslie Fiedler
#2. The nonfiction novel or literary memoir as authored by women is usually given a much harder time in mainstream criticism.
Kate Zambreno
#3. I am thus led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative ... A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.
E.L. Doctorow
#4. Sometimes blissful ignorance is awfully empowering
Guy Kawasaki
#5. He prizes ambiguity; he loves to keep you guessing.
Lionel Shriver
#6. People seem to read so much more nonfiction than fiction, and so it always gives me great pleasure to introduce a friend or family member to a novel I believe they'll cherish but might not otherwise have thought to pick up and read.
Chris Bohjalian
#7. You can always spot a fool, for he is a man who will tell you he knows who is going to win an election.
Robert Harris
#8. I have published a proclamation: 'Forgive us our transgressions as we forgive those who transgress against us.' I have ordered all citizens to return to their parishes to enjoy the benefits of this general amnesty.
Toussaint Louverture
#9. Trust me, it has been anything but easy to make it as an actor.
Dhanush
#10. I read all of the nonfiction that I could find on Chechnya, and all the while, I was searching for a novel that was set there. I couldn't find a single novel written in English that was set in the period of the two most recent Chechen wars.
Anthony Marra
#11. 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
#12. The DNA of the novel - which, if I begin to write nonfiction, I will write about this - is that: the title of the novel is the whole novel. The first line of the novel is the whole novel. The point of view is the whole novel. Every subplot is the whole novel. The verb tense is the whole novel.
Mary Kay Zuravleff
#13. 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
#14. When I'm working on a novel of my own, I try to read mostly nonfiction, although sometimes I break down and peek at something else.
Carl Hiaasen
#15. I did not set out to write another novel. One day I sat down with the thought of trying my hand at a piece of nonfiction, a personal memoir of youth, but over the next several weeks, without intending it, the work began evolving into what has become 'Tomcat in Love.'
Tim O'Brien
#16. My responsibility is to make a film and find my dramatic language; I don't have any political or social responsibility.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
#17. Art is not supposed to repeat what you already know. It is supposed to ask questions.
Sarah Thornton
#18. And as he was capable of giant joy, so did he harbor huge sorrow, so that when his dog died the world ended.
John Steinbeck
#19. It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.
E. O. Wilson
#21. I'm working on a nonfiction book on Nepal and a novel about diasporas.
Louise Brown
#22. closed my door as he strode down the hall and banged my head back against it. So much for not falling for him
R.J. Prescott
#23. [T]he ways in which the information we give off about our selves, in photos and e-mails and MySpace pages and all the rest of it, has dramatically increased our social visibility and made it easier for us to find each other but also to be scrutinized in public.
Clay Shirky
#24. 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
#25. Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.
Joan Didion
#26. 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
#27. I feel your hands on your phone when you read my texts. I
go to the Stock after your shifts just to stand where you've stood. I fall asleep on the pillow you used
when you were in my bed. I need to share whatever piece of the world you're in. Tell me you don't
feel the same.
C.D. Reiss
#29. I don't know, 53 years with the same human being? I can't be around myself for more than three or four hours before I want to kill everybody.
Scott Baio
