Quotes About Fiction And Nonfiction

#1. He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.

Stephen King

#2. Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

Chad Harbach

#3. Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths.

Yann Martel

#4. I've long been interested in the role of 'minor characters' in major events. This has been the focus of a lot of the fiction and nonfiction I've written.

Thomas Mallon

#5. An author's ability to bring a marketing synopsis to the table - along with a great manuscript - makes a difference in what books get picked up. This is true for both fiction and nonfiction titles. You need to show your publisher what you've got in your marketing arsenal.

M.J. Rose

#6. look, and I'm sure you'll be amazed at the wealth of great books - usually there are several hundred freebies in virtually every category of fiction and nonfiction, every day of the year. And these aren't just the

Steve Weber

#7. I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority.

Peter Matthiessen

#8. I write both fiction and nonfiction. I begin my fiction with the main character. The story comes later.

David A. Adler

#9. Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction.

Joan D. Vinge

#10. It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.

Erica Jong

#11. In terms of going back and forth between fiction and nonfiction - in which I'll include memoir, biography, and true crime - is that one relieves the other.

Kathryn Harrison

#12. The funny thing is that in Bosnia there are no words that are equivalent to fiction and nonfiction. From the storytelling point of view, the difference is artificial.

Aleksandar Hemon

#13. Redheaded Peckerwood, which unerringly walks the fine line between fiction and nonfiction, is a disturbingly beautiful narrative about unfathomable violence and its place on the land

Luc Sante

#14. Both types of books - fiction and nonfiction - are a search for story. As a writer and a reader, there's nothing I crave more than a good story!

Susan Campbell Bartoletti

#15. That part of what I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction didn't obtain, how the correspondence between text and world was less important than the intensities of the poem itself, what possibilities of feeling were opened up in the present tense of reading.

Ben Lerner

#16. There is a difference between fiction and nonfiction deeper than technique or intention. I value both but genuinely believe that fiction can tell a larger truth.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#17. I enjoy the writings of all of these authors and they have been very inspirational for me. But I think that it is important as writers of metaphysical, New Age, occult fiction and nonfiction to not take ourselves too seriously.

Frederick Lenz

#18. To be creative means to connect. It's to abolish the gap between the body, the mind and the soul, between science and art, between fiction and nonfiction.

Nawal El Saadawi

#19. In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.

Aleksandar Hemon

#20. There's no division on my bookshelf between fiction and nonfiction. As far as I'm concerned, fiction is about the truth.

Arundhati Roy

#21. My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.

Tom Bissell

#22. I would advise the curious reader to keep in mind the old adage "truth is stranger than fiction." Expect the most outlandish, fantastic and unbelievable elements of this story to be true, and the more low-key elements to be fudged.

Dan Grajek

#23. I never look at a painting and ask, "Is this painting fictional or non-fictional?" It's just a painting.

Scott McClanahan

#24. 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

#25. The two endorsements I'm most proud of come from Isabel Wilkerson and Toni Morrison. The latter is the greatest American fiction writer of our time, and the former is on her way to being the greatest American nonfiction writer of our time.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#26. I read the same amount of nonfiction and fiction.

Anne Lamott

#27. In 1982, when I was almost 26 years old, I decided I wanted to write fiction. I'd majored in journalism in college, and I'd always assumed I would write nonfiction.

Cynthia Kadohata

#28. Where once his grandparents put up crucifixes and images of the benediction on their walls, he and Reine-Marie put up books on theirs. History books. Reference books. Biographies. Fiction, nonfiction. Stories lined the walls and both insulated them from the outside world and connected them to it.

Louise Penny

#29. I think we got some work done, back at the start, because nobody knew us, nobody bothered us - and we had no money.

Robert M. Edsel

#30. I've read more truth in fiction than in nonfiction, partly because fiction can deal with the numinous, and nonfiction rarely does.

Dean Koontz

#31. In early drafts, one of the trickiest things for me to do was to realize that the techniques and devices that make readable and compelling nonfiction are not always identical to the ones that make good fiction.

Kathleen Rooney

#32. In fiction, when you paint yourself into a corner, you can write a pair of suction cups onto the bottoms of your shoes and walk up the wall and out the skylight and see the sun breaking through the clouds. In nonfiction, you don't have that luxury.

Tom Robbins

#33. Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It's the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.

Ellen Hopkins

#34. With the historical fictions, I was already doing so much research, and so much of the stories was anchored by historical truth that the move to nonfiction didn't feel all that dramatic - just another half-step to the right.

Debra Dean

#35. 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

#36. If you are asking if the story of Jason and the Argonauts is fiction or nonfiction, I will answer that there is no difference between the two in the world I inhabit.

Vince Vawter

#37. My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me.

Tom Wolfe

#38. I wrote six nonfiction books before getting into narrative fiction with 'Robopocalypse,' including 'How to Survive a Robot Uprising.' My goal all along was to start writing fiction, and I guess one day I'd just had enough.

Daniel H. Wilson

#39. If someone's a racist, punch them in the mouth so they will be sadder, and therefore less likely to stereotype. (Even if Fargas's theory is flawed, on the upside, at least you've punched a racist in the mouth.)

Jeff Wilser

#40. Anyhow, my point is that you know now that nonfiction is never the entire truth, and fiction is almost never pure fabrication.

Ken Andersen

#41. Reading is not passive. It is only when the reader brings his/her own experiences to the work and breathes life into the author's words that they consummate the relationship and together bring the story to life.

Chuck Miceli

#42. 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

#43. The notion that anything can be invented wholly and that these invented things are classified as 'fiction' and that other writing, presumably not made up, is called 'nonfiction' strikes me as a very arbitrary separation of things.

James Salter

#44. I read nonfiction almost exclusively - both for research and also for pleasure. When I read fiction, it's almost always in the thriller genre, and it needs to rivet me in the opening few chapters.

Dan Brown

#45. I'm drawn to fiction that hints at nonfiction, that blurs or seems to blur the boundaries between invention and autobiography.

Garth Greenwell

#46. The difference between nonfiction and fiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable.

Mark Twain

#47. Maybe I'll work for a label someday, write some fiction, nonfiction. Someday I'd like to go back to school and get my teaching degree. I want to be a grandpa. I want to have more kids.

Art Alexakis

#48. Maybe I have a one-track mind, but the best writers and thinkers are focusing on nonfiction these days; this is the genre where a writer can make a mark and change an aspect of the world - much more so than in fiction.

Lee Gutkind

#49. 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

#50. Movies feel like work, and reading fiction feels like work, whereas reading nonfiction feels like pleasure.

Peter Morgan

#51. I started off doing fiction in 1993. It didn't occur to me to do nonfiction because it wasn't a thing yet. So I was bumbling around, writing short stories, and then I took a nonfiction workshop, and I realized that this was what I was supposed to do.

Meghan Daum

#52. I would write light entertainment nonfiction pieces during the day, then come home and work on my fantasy fiction. It was very difficult to get out of the one mindset and into another one.

Cassandra Clare

#53. The truth is that every writer, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, is trying to write something truly original and that's what I think I'm doing.

Lisa Scottoline

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

Sunny

#55. In certain fiction, she perceives truths that she rarely finds in nonfiction; therefore, in her quest to better understand the world and the meaning of her life, she reads those novels that suggest a world of wonders, dark and light, forever unfolding for eyes willing to see.

Dean Koontz

#56. Medicine, you see, is my first love; whether I write fiction or nonfiction, and even when it has nothing to do with medicine, it's still about medicine. After all, what is medicine but life plus? So I write about life.

Abraham Verghese

#57. I realized I couldn't have one foot in the fiction world and one foot in the nonfiction world, which is why 'Here I Go Again' is so not me. I didn't graduate from high school in the '90s, I never listened to metal music, and I don't time travel.

Jen Lancaster

#58. I used to be a freelance journalist, so I had to write fast, but I always found writing nonfiction constraining. I like the freedom of fiction, where I get to invent everything, and tidy, conclusive endings are within my control.

Michelle Gagnon

#59. Everyone else thinks I'm a nonfiction writer. I think it's because my nonfiction is easier to find. But I write both in equal measure. I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself, and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

Roxane Gay

#60. I am consumed, or I have been consumed, with these issues of motherhood and the way we act out societal expectations and roles. So both my nonfiction and my fiction have been pretty much exclusively about that.

Ayelet Waldman

#61. 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

#62. I love making fiction films as well as nonfiction ones, and hope to keep challenging myself to make better and better work.

Lucy Walker

#63. I read a lot of science fiction, but I also mixed it up with a lot of other genres: crime, literary fiction, as well as nonfiction. Author-wise, I'm a fan of Stephen King, Lauren Beukes, Robert McCammon, Raymond Chandler, Greg Rucka, Ed Brubaker and Gail Simone, among many others.

Adam Christopher

#64. I read little nonfiction, but I have no boundaries about the fiction I relish. The only unfailing criterion is that I can hitch my heart to the imagined world and read on.

Scott Turow

#65. Peoria is such a seemingly quintessential American city, and I had always wanted to draw on that in either my fiction or in nonfiction. The Midwest is also a landscape that I have always been infatuated with, perhaps because it's the first one I can truly remember.

Dinaw Mengestu

#66. As a writer who writes poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, I think it's important to always maintain a firm grasp on genre and ethics.

Kathleen Rooney

#67. With fiction, you can take something that bothers you, or that you don't have in clear focus, and you can put it under as much stress as you want. Really get underneath the skin. With nonfiction, you're restricted to what happened.

Phil Klay

#68. If a reader believes that everything in nonfiction or history is just objectively true, I don't really know what to tell them, except that at least in fiction, the choice of what perspective and bias to tell a given story from - which is always a deliberate choice - is foregrounded and clear.

Kathleen Rooney

#69. Nonfiction is a form of literature that lies halfway between fiction and fact.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered 'nonfiction.'

Joyce Carol Oates

#73. For me in my twenties, working in Hollywood was confusing in that the differences between what was fiction and what was nonfiction seemed to blur in my mind. Everything became a visual memory for me. I carried my Leica camera, giving opportunity to take pictures from my view.

John Van Hamersveld

#74. I come from a little island with the Caribbean Sea on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. I come from, really, nowhere, and for me, the fiction and the nonfiction, creative or otherwise, all come from the same place.

Jamaica Kincaid

#75. The story you are about to read is a work of fiction. Nothing - and everything - about it is real.

Todd Strasser

#76. I never wanted to be an editor. I never wanted to be a boss. I just wanted to write, and it didn't make any difference whether it was fiction or nonfiction or short stories or whatever. I just - that's what I was destined to do.

Frank Deford