Top 100 Quotes About Nonfiction
#1. Movies feel like work, and reading fiction feels like work, whereas reading nonfiction feels like pleasure.
Peter Morgan
#2. To be a success you need to have persistence of drive, persistence of vision, and persistence of action. You will be doing yourself a disservice by not staying resilient.
Meghan Wier
#3. I love nonfiction the most. It's hard to find a good nonfiction story, and that's why I'm not as prolific, I guess, as a lot of people. They're hard to find. I love the nonfiction writer Ben Macintyre. I think he's terrific at the form of telling a story in a cinematic way.
Robert Kurson
#4. 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
#5. When going for your goals, staying motivated, enthusiastic, and flexible are daily deeds of daring.
Beverly K. Bachel
#6. The American war-writing tradition is a proud one and booming in this era of the Global War on Terror - at least in the nonfiction realm. Hundreds of memoirs and press accounts from Iraq and Afghanistan have been published since 9/11.
Matt Gallagher
#7. I don't read that many novels, I'm more of a nonfiction fan.
Cory Monteith
#8. As Michel de Montaigne observed, "The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful; the best occupations are the least forced."
p 233
Gretchen Rubin
#9. Most books aren't pure nonfiction or fiction.
James Frey
#10. The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue ...
Bruno Bettelheim
#11. In all of time, all of space, there will only be one you. How can you be anything but perfect? As you are. Mad, sad, glad. You are amazing.
Cindy Marcus
#12. I like nonfiction books about people with wretched lives.
David Sedaris
#13. But that's what nonfiction is, people. Shitty feelings and encounters with death.
Mark Leyner
#14. Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.
Chad Harbach
#15. In order to understand more it is imperative that we improve our knowledge before choosing which side of the fence we feel compelled to belong,
J.P. Robinson
#16. Change for someone today and tomorrow you will hear them say, "You are not the same.
Akash Lakhotia
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.
Aleksandar Hemon
#20. I've always read broadly: literary fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, chick lit, historical, dystopian, nonfiction, memoir. I've even read Westerns. I prefer female protagonists.
Sandra Cisneros
#21. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#23. Your limits are somewhere up there, waiting for you to reach beyond infinity.
Arnold Henry
#24. Reading literary fiction stimulates cognition beyond the brain functions related to reading, say, magazine articles, interviews, or most online nonfiction reporting.
Susan Reynolds
#25. Money has the power to get, all that you want.
Money has the power to make you forget, all that you want.
Akash Lakhotia
#26. I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction.
Irvine Welsh
#27. In video games, one of the most helpless against injustice can even mighty.
Glenn Greenwald
#28. Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you.
Tim O'Brien
#29. 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
#30. When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies.
Irvine Welsh
#32. As a student at the time, I kind of felt like my only options as a nonfiction writer were to either jump on the personal essay bus or linger back at the station, hoping that some other heretofore unknown mode of transportation was going to magically show up to take me where I wanted to go.
John D'Agata
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. Most important thing in life is family,
Without them you are nothing.
Whatever you do will be worth nothing,
If there is no one to appreciate it.
Akash Lakhotia
#36. I took out my grenade and put my fingers inside the pin. 'Do you boys want this to be your last meal, or do you want to answer his question?
Ishmael Beah
#37. Beast Books will be longer than conventional long-form magazine articles but shorter than conventional nonfiction books. They will be published digitally and distributed on multiple platforms, and will soon thereafter be available as handy paperbacks.
Tina Brown
#38. I've been a lifelong horror fan, but at the same time, I would say 90 percent of my reading is biographies and nonfiction history.
Seth Grahame-Smith
#39. Yet there are some critics in the nonfiction world who still look at some of today's stranger interpretations of the essay and say "You don't belong here. That's not how we do things." I think that's problematic.
John D'Agata
#40. 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
#41. As a nonfiction writer you must get on the plane. If the subject interests you, go after it, even if it's in the next county or the next state or the next country. It's not going to come looking for you. Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.--William Zinsser
Meg Lukens Noonan
#42. Life is way too short, so try to enjoy every minute of it with a sense of humor!
Christina Scalise
#43. You can tell a more over-the-top incredible story if you use a nonfiction form.
Chuck Palahniuk
#44. Nonfiction means that our stories are as true and accurate as possible. Readers expect - demand - diligence.
Lee Gutkind
#45. I considered not getting up, but recognized the pain of staying down was worse than the pain of attempting to stand.
Reba Riley
#46. I often read nonfiction, and some of my ideas begin there.
Will Hobbs
#47. One of the odder byways of nonfiction is the dishy memoir by those who have served the great or the near-great.
Robert Gottlieb
#48. When facing a decision that stands a 50/50 chance of being correct, the choice made will be wrong 80% of the time. Rick Coxen
Frederick L. Coxen
#49. I always think about the past, it's so large and bright.
Anna Akhmatova
#50. To make your goals savvy, keep them both personal (meaningful to you and aligned with your values) and positive (so you feel good about what you're trying to accomplish.
Beverly K. Bachel
#51. The human condition is such that we can only stomach so much imagination. We need for things to be labeled either fiction or nonfiction. There is no section in between.
J.W. Lord
#52. I give this book 5 Stars and highly recommend it to all fiction, nonfiction, and poetry writers, aspiring writers, bloggers or journalists.
Sunny
#53. What we say to each other-even when it's anonymous, even when we think no one is paying attention, even when it's online-matters. Words have meaning.
Justine Ezarik
#54. I need to tell the things that are important but which don't make sense in terms of the narrative, things that would destroy symmetry or narrative pace. This is my personal belief about what it means to write nonfiction.
Akhil Sharma
#55. There was however, a group of 507 individuals who were permanent street dwellers [in Miami.] These 507 were not indigent, down-on-their-luck families. They were single people and every one of them was mentally ill.
Pete Earley
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. El Shaddai. My all-sufficient God who is able to handle all my needs. Everything I will ever need I can find in Him. Think about that for a moment. Do you sense the power He offers us in those words? There is nothing, absolutely nothing in your life that He cannot handle.
Diane Moody
#59. Nonfiction writers are second-class citizens, the Ellis Island of literature. We just can't quite get in. And yes, it pisses me off.
William Styron
#60. Reputation is an outcome; but it is also a valuable, strategic asset.
Andrew Griffin
#61. I receive grace. And through me, grace could flow on. Like a cycle of water in continuous movement, grace is meant to fall, a rain ... again, again, again. I could share the grace, multiply the joy, extend the table of the feast, enlarge the paradise of His presence. I am blessed. I can bless.
Ann Voskamp
#62. The challenge for a nonfiction writer is to achieve a poetic precision using the documents of truth but somehow to make people and places spring to life as if the reader was in their presence.
Simon Schama
#63. People and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built. Every human event happens somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that somewhere was like.
William Zinsser
#65. Fiction is harder for me than nonfiction - more gratifying, as a result, when it succeeds.
Rick Bass
#66. 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
#67. But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider who is listening to me; and, if I stop to consider what is proper to be said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any part at all is proper.
Thomas De Quincey
#68. We can no longer allow them to write just stories and poems; we must teach them the forms of nonfiction writing as well, specifically that of writing on demand.
Troy Hicks
#69. Fiction is entertaining. Nonfiction is epic.
A.D. Posey
#70. Rationally, factory farming is so obviously wrong, in so many ways. In all of my reading and conversations, I've yet to find a credible defense of it. But food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, and identity.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#71. Life! What Inscrutable Card Shall Ye Throw Next Upon the Soft Felt of Our Days?
Colson Whitehead
#72. To me, the moment you're talking about nonfiction you're talking about reality.
David Shields
#73. It is true that "atheism" is a negative word, but so is "nonfiction." They are double negatives. Both words tell you that what you are getting is real, not pretend. Those of
Dan Barker
#74. I don't like to read nonfiction. To me, fact is something I can look up.
Fran Lebowitz
#75. For outdoors, he wears a mantle fastened at the shoulder with a clasp or chain; although buttons are sometimes used for decoration, the buttonhole has not been invented.
Joseph Gies
#76. Nonfiction lets us learn more; fiction lets us be more.
Kylene Beers
#78. 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
#79. Make mistakes, a thousand of them because we are only humans.
Never repeat your mistakes because we are humans.
Akash Lakhotia
#80. Every successful piece of nonfiction should leave the reader with one provocative thought that he or she didn't have before. Not two thoughts, or five - just one. So decide what single point you want to leave in the reader's mind.
William Zinsser
#81. Nonfiction is more personal for me. It's more personal in that it's more direct, and actually it's always been more direct, even when I first started doing pieces.
Joan Didion
#82. The Annual Register for 1763 tabulated the casualty list for British sailors in the Seven Years' War with France. Out of 184,899 men raised or rounded up for the war, 133, 708 died from disease, primarily scurvy, while only 1,512 were killed in action.
Stephen R. Brown
#83. 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
#84. I'm sure the holy refrigerator is packed solid with cartons of Blue Bell ice cream - times a million. All those amazing flavor combinations minus the calories and fat grams, of course. After all, we are talking about heaven here, amen?
Diane Moody
#86. When you're teaching creative nonfiction, it helps to have written about your life in a very open way, because you can say, 'Look, how much are you willing to risk emotionally to write? How careful can you be with the other people you're writing about?'
Marya Hornbacher
#87. Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.(p.115)
Malcolm Gladwell
#88. And there are two types of stories. One type is one's own story. The other type is telling the stories of others. Thanks to this genre, writers of nonfiction can now use the tools of the reporter, the points of view and ear for dialog of a novelist, and the passion and wordplay of the poet.
Lee Gutkind
#89. 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
#90. different genres. To go with her fiction, she also writes nonfiction in many different fields with books available on resume writing, companion gardening
Dale Mayer
#91. 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
#92. Some nights the sky wept stars that quickly floated and disappeared into the darkness before our wishes could meet them.
Ishmael Beah
#93. Writing fiction or nonfiction is a lonely battle wrestling with sentences in an effort to put together an intelligible thought that speaks for the author.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. For you and me, just knowing His presence is all around us can help lift us from the darkest night, embrace us in the loneliest hour, give us strength when we are tempted, and enable us to live confident and secure in His promises.
Diane Moody
#97. The melancholy comes over me, the dismal misery of not knowing where I am, or perhaps losing any sense of who I am, as if the mist is bringing about an evaporation of identity, all the certainties of the self leaching away into the cloud.
Simon Armitage
#98. I've written six novels and four pieces of nonfiction, so I don't really have a genre these days.
Anne Lamott
#99. Ask yourself exactly what you want in your life - now and in the future. If you were given the opportunity to do or have anything, what would it be, and why?
Beverly K. Bachel
#100. (And also like Satan, I'm a beautiful loser.)
Benjamin Hale
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