Quotes About Nonfiction Writing

#1. One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.

William Zinsser

#2. New freedoms surface old habits. I haven't left sin behind, only discovered a new medium for my treachery. My real trouble as a writer isn't trying to mean the words that I write. It's living into the words that I mean. Nonfiction writing can feel like the high art of hypocrisy.

Jen Pollock Michel

#3. Whether it's fiction or nonfiction, writing takes me to another world.

Leonard Mlodinow

#4. If uncovering the truth is the greatest challenge of nonfiction writing, it is also the greatest reward.

Candice Millard

#5. 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

#6. When I was in college I started writing prose, because a very smart professor asked me what I like to read and I said, "Novels," and she said, "You should be writing them then." Memoir never even occurred to me. I think I was afraid of nonfiction and I was afraid of navel-gazing, and of being seen.

Melissa Febos

#7. It ain't so easy writing about nothin

Patti Smith

#8. ....and on occasion I like to write in pencil, because I need to know that I can erase the words, even if I never do.

Bruce Black

#9. 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

#10. Writing nonfiction has been my most serious education, and for all those years it kept me from even glancing in the direction of despair.

Marilynne Robinson

#11. I feel better off doing what I know how to do. I feel a strong element of fictional style in travel writing anyway. Some call it creative nonfiction.

John Gimlette

#12. 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

#13. If you wrote about sex the way Jim [Salter] writes about sex in nonfiction, you would be a sociopath.

Lorin Stein

#14. Good writing is good writing no matter what genre you're writing in, and I believe that there are only a handful of fundamental craft tools that are essential for any genre-including nonfiction.

Georgia Heard

#15. You know, everybody's ignorant, just on different subjects.

Will Rogers

#16. Most nonfiction writers have a definitiveness complex. They feel that they are under some obligation - to the subject, to their honor, to the gods of writing - to make their article the last word. It's a commendable impulse, but there is no last word.

William Zinsser

#17. I never really considered writing something that was nonfiction.

Vanessa Diffenbaugh

#18. Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, I've never had the sense I was 'making up' a character. It feels more like watching people reveal themselves, ever more deeply, more intimately.

Kathryn Harrison

#19. Nonfiction. I didn't choose it as much as it chose me. It squatted and birthed me one raw winter day then jerked me up and set me to scribing.

Chila Woychik

#20. While I was in school, trying to figure out how to write an essay that could both satisfy my nonfiction workshops and still pass as something hybrid-y enough for my poetry workshops, I was looking for models, for forebears.

John D'Agata

#21. Nonfiction ties your hands a bit, and just like writing poetry in rhyme, it can force you to make more brutal decisions in terms of word choice, plot, etc.

Emily Susan Rapp

#22. For every work of fiction, the author inserts a bit of themself to make the story seem more real. For every work of nonfiction, the edges of reality must be blurred creatively to keep the reader's interest.

A.K. Wallace

#23. Ever hear the expression "write what you know?" My version says "write what you want to know." If you want to know about the history of Spain, write about the history of Spain - fiction or nonfiction. If your fascinated by the old west, maybe your character lives there.

Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

#24. The writer's object should be to hold the reader's attention. I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end. This is accomplished only when the narrative moves steadily ahead, not when it comes to a weary standstill, overloaded with every item uncovered in the research.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#25. Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.

Joan Didion

#26. 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

#27. Writing fiction is fun. Writing non-fiction is life-changing.

A.D. Posey

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. Nonfiction at its best is like fashioning a cabinet. It can never be a sculpture. It can be elegant and very beautiful, but it can never be sculpture. Captive to facts - or predetermined form - it cannot fly.

Peter Matthiessen

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.

Judith Krantz

#34. When you're speaking in the truest, most intimate voice about your life, you are speaking with the universal voice.

Cheryl Strayed

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction.

Irvine Welsh

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. Fiction is entertaining. Nonfiction is epic.

A.D. Posey

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.

E. O. Wilson

#51. 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

#52. After writing fiction for so long, I like the discovery element of nonfiction, in the sense that when you find the right information, it feels like gold.

Edwidge Danticat

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. What makes me want to keep reading a nonfiction text is the encounter with a surprising, well-stocked mind as it takes on the challenge of the next sentence, paragraph,

Phillip Lopate

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

Hassan Osman

#57. 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

#58. Writing a nonfiction story is like cracking a safe. It seems impossible at the beginning, but once you're in, you're in.

Rich Cohen

#59. The act of writing should not be accompanied by the sense of an audience, someone peering over your shoulder, but in nonfiction I think it's almost imperative that you identify an audience so you can confirm or challenge or undermine whatever ideas or prejudices they might have about your subject.

Pankaj Mishra

#60. I feel like I'm almost ready to write fiction about the border. But even after 10 years of writing nonfiction about it, I don't think I know quite enough to do it right.

William T. Vollmann

#61. Writing nonfiction means I tell people's stories for them, not because they're special but because we all are.

Jo Deurbrouck

#62. When people ask what kind of nonfiction I write, I say 'all kinds,' but really I mean I don't write any kind at all: I'm trying to dissolve the borders between memoir and journalism and criticism by weaving them together.

Leslie Jamison

#63. It's exhausting writing nonfiction, particularly when it's personal. It's tiring, always speaking about things that are not necessarily fun retelling.

Ishmael Beah