Quotes About Nonfiction

#1. 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

#2. I grew up reading Stephen King, Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Robert McCammon, Isaac Asimov's nonfiction books, and Roald Dahl.

Nnedi Okorafor

#3. 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

#4. I read almost exclusively nonfiction when I read, because even though it's harder to find a great true story, when you find one, the idea that it actually happened is immensely powerful.That's what moves me the most.

Robert Kurson

#5. 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

#6. Because the kind of nonfiction I write has a plot, the events and transactions that make up a life, nonfiction offers me a break from plotting.

Kathryn Harrison

#7. I'm not sure what to call 'Lego Star Wars: The Visual Dictionary.' Nonfiction? Movie/toy fiction? But it is any Lego/'Star Wars' kid's dream. Call it spectacular.

Jon Scieszka

#8. I think all of the best nonfiction that has ever been made comes from the result of someone who can't stop thinking about a certain topic - a very specific aspect of a certain topic in some cases. And second, they got really good at figuring out what they had to say about it.

Merlin Mann

#9. 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

#10. I'm all about nonfiction. I rarely read fiction. I like to read about things that really happened, facts, real life situations. That's what inspires me.

Phil Keoghan

#11. We like nonfiction, and we live in fictitious times,

Michael Moore

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

Lorin Stein

#13. I'm not a poet, but I was in the poetry program. And I'm also not much of a nonfiction writer, at least not in the standard sense of nonfiction, nor especially in the way we were thinking about nonfiction back then, in the late 90s.

John D'Agata

#14. I write narrative nonfiction, creating lively scenes through action and the use of quotes from firsthand accounts, all based on rigorous research. If I say a character leaned against a fence on a windy day, than I have at least two sources to back up these details.

Jim Murphy

#15. I come from a family of writers. My mom had been a writer, nonfiction books, and her mother was a playwright in the 1930s and '40s. And my twin brother, Alexi, is a writer on 'The Following.'

Noah Hawley

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. The nonfiction novel or literary memoir as authored by women is usually given a much harder time in mainstream criticism.

Kate Zambreno

#19. 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

#20. I have written two nonfiction books, I'm embarrassed to say.

Dirk Benedict

#21. But with nonfiction, the task is very straightforward: Do the research, tell the story.

Laura Hillenbrand

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

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

Arundhati Roy

#26. The challenge of nonfiction is to marry art and truth.

Phyllis Rose

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. People respect nonfiction but they read novels.

E. O. Wilson

#30. Ironically, in today's marketplace successful nonfiction has to be unbelievable, while successful fiction must be believable.

Jerry B. Jenkins

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. I always squirm when I read what's called 'creative nonfiction,' and the writer is lobbing gobs of emotion and language at the world, hoping some of it will stick.

Stewart O'Nan

#34. Poetry is a way of coming to know the realness of things; fiction is a way of coming to know the world of relationships; nonfiction is a way of coming to know the world of the mind.

Kelly Cherry

#35. Nonfiction writers are the packhorses of literature. We're meant to carry the story. If we can make it up and down the mountain by a reliable if not scenic route, we have delivered. Technique is optional.

Stacy Schiff

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

Dean Koontz

#37. I haven't written a whole lot of nonfiction, but what I have written leads me to believe that it's an entirely different muscle. The ongoing paradox is that sometimes it's harder to get to the emotional truth of something when you only have the facts at your disposal.

Ron Currie Jr.

#38. 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

#39. Like all art, nonfiction film should invite, seduce, or force us to confront the most difficult, frightening or mysterious aspects of what it means to be human.

Joshua Oppenheimer

#40. 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

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

Erica Jong

#42. 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

#43. I've written fiction ... but the nonfiction has always received the most attention.

Jim Murphy

#44. This is not the case. I find scant evidence in my nonfiction that I have matured at all. I cannot find a single idea I hadn't swiped from somebody else and enunciated plonkingly by the time I reached the seventh grade.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

#45. Late summer is perfect for classic mysteries - think of Raymond Chandler's hot Santa Anas and Agatha Christie's Mediterranean resorts - while big ambitious works of nonfiction are best approached in September and early October, when we still feel energetic and the grass no longer needs to be cut.

Michael Dirda

#46. 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

#47. I don't do nonfiction anymore. Eventually, you just feel constrained by the facts. You want to go where the words take you, and people's actual lives don't always conform. And you can't know them that well.

Tom Drury

#48. I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.

Jonathan Franzen

#49. In December 2011, I will be opening up my production house, Sharmeen Obaid Films, and aspire to change the way Pakistanis approach nonfiction storytelling. There are thousands of stories to be found here.

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

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

Leonard Mlodinow

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. Marie keeps asking for books about zombies and I keep telling her I can't read nonfiction for story time, but . .

Isaac Marion

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. Now that I'm taking some time off from school, I've been reading a lot to make sure I don't forget everything. It's mostly classics and nonfiction accounts from actors, directors and writers from the '40s and '50s.

Fred Savage

#58. 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

#59. I wanted to make a late-night-type show that happened to be in the morning for moms. Bravo was more interested in a blend of my books 'Momzillas' and 'Sometimes I Feel Like a Nut,' which is a collection of nonfiction essays.

Jill Kargman

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

Anne Lamott

#61. I like to get paid for doing basic research, so it's pleasant to write some nonfiction about it.

Bruce Sterling

#62. When your work is nonfiction about low-income communities, pretty much anything that's not nonfiction about low-income communities feels like a guilty pleasure.

Katherine Boo

#63. I've always considered myself a nonfiction artist.

James Sanborn

#64. 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

#65. I like to read, especially nonfiction. I love learning, so I study languages, cook, learn basic HTML, and enjoy other activities that stimulate communication and the dark recesses of my musician's brain.

Joshua Roman

#66. 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

#67. I think I can safely call 2012 average. Overall, it was a stronger year for nonfiction than fiction - a situation that would've surprised me back in January, when I was looking forward to big new novels from several authors I really love.

David Edelstein

#68. I remember reading an interview with a writer who said that in nonfiction if you have one lie it sort of messes it up. But in fiction the real details give you so much more credibility, because people do so much research just to write fiction. In fiction you're trying to recreate something lifelike.

Edwidge Danticat

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

Mark Twain

#70. My work was entirely nonfiction.

Laura Hillenbrand

#71. When you deal with nonfiction you deal with human characters.

Marya Hornbacher

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. The myth of objectivity made nonfiction increasingly unread. In feature articles, we could be playful in the opening and clever in the end but in the middle it was back to the boring basics.

Lee Gutkind

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. Writers of nonfiction have the right - perhaps even the responsibility - to access the wonders of the writer's craft to make their work interesting and enjoyable.

Sol Stein

#79. It's rare for me to read any fiction. I almost only read nonfiction. I don't believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures. People who call reading detective fiction or eating dessert a guilty pleasure make me want to puke.

Ira Glass

#80. In nonfiction, you have that limitation, that constraint, of telling the truth.

Peter Matthiessen

#81. 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

#82. This has been my greatest challenge: because the current reality now seems so unreal, it's hard to make nonfiction seem believable. But you, my friend [Michael Moore], are able to do that.

Kurt Vonnegut

#83. 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

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

Garth Greenwell

#85. 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

#86. I read a little bit of nonfiction and a lot of poetry. I think of poetry as my shot of whiskey when I don't have time to savor a whole bottle of wine.

Alice McDermott

#87. I view myself as a fiction writer who just happens to write nonfiction. I think I look at the world through a fiction-writer's eyes.

Tom Bissell

#88. I like European and South American literature, but mostly I read nonfiction.

Jessa Crispin

#89. 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

#90. When I write nonfiction, it's always absolutely true. There will be no moment in my nonfiction where I have made something up and have to apologize to the bullying hostess of a talk show.

Jamaica Kincaid

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. 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

#94. Truth is stranger than nonfiction. And life is too interesting to be left to journalists. People have stories, but journalists have 'takes,' and it's their takes that usually win out when the stories are too complicated or, as happens, not complicated enough.

Walter Kirn

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

Joseph Wambaugh

#96. I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.

Joan Didion

#97. 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

#98. 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

#99. I write nonfiction because individuals are unique and go through different experiences, our collective experiences enhances all our lives.

Thaddeus Lawrence

#100. I contend that in the kind of nonfiction I write, and that other people also pursue, anything is permissible provided the reader knows what you're taking liberties with.

William Least Heat-Moon