Non Fiction Quotes

• It's true that I don't rearrange that much in the fiction, but I feel if you change even one name or the order of one event then you have to call it fiction or you get all the credits of non-fiction without paying the price.

  Nicholson Baker

  Order, Names, Events

  "A life in writing". Interview with Nicholas Wroe, www.theguardian.com. September 18, 2009.

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• I make non-fiction partly because I'm not that good of a writer. My talent, if I have any, is in balancing, capturing and directing reality, rather than creating scenarios.

  Robert Greene

  Reality, Creating, Fiction

  Source: www.indiewire.com

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• To my mind, the prose in a non-fiction work that's going to endure has to be of the same quality as the prose in a work of fiction that endures.

  Robert Caro

  Mind, Quality, Fiction

  "The Round Table: Fiction, Biography And The Use Of Power". Interview with Kurt Vonnegut, www.robertcaro.com. 1999.

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• That is as true for fiction or non-fiction. The writer has to really know their subject. It is really important to remember that the readers are a lot smarter than the writer. Also, good writing has to do with rewriting. You will never get it right the first time. So you rewrite and rewrite again until you get it right. Until you, and the reader, will be able to visualize what you're writing about.

  Michael Scott

  Writing, Important, Fiction

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• A couple of pieces of advice for the kids who are serious about writing are: first of all, to read everything you can get your hands on so you can become familiar with different forms of writing: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, journalism. That's very important. And also keep a journal. Not so much, because it's good writing practice. Although it is, but more because it's a wonderful source of story starters.

  Ann M. Martin

  Couple, Writing, Kids

  Source: www.glamour.com

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• Without books we're a very uneducated society. Think of the places books have taken us, the people we've been introduced to (fiction or non-fiction) and how books have allowed us to broaden our vocabulary.

  Tom Robinson

  Book, Taken, Thinking

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• I honestly believe that everything I know about the writing of non-fiction (or writing) could be engraved on the head of a pin with a garden hoe.

  M. F. K. Fisher

  Believe, Writing, Garden

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• My non-fiction films are pretty much fiction, or at least close... It's all "movies" for me. I never have searched for a subject. They always just come along. They never come by way of decision-making. They just haunt me. I can't get rid of them. I did not invite them.

  Werner Herzog

  Decision, Fiction, Way

  Interview with Andy Battaglia, www.avclub.com. May 24, 2007.

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• I don't think people are averse to thinking about things in a deep way, but we have limited time and opportunity to think about things in a deep way. I think that's why there is an appetite for non-fiction - it gives people the opportunity to reexamine ordinary experience and be smarter about it.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Opportunity, Thinking, People

  Interview with Donna Bowman, www.avclub.com. November 17, 2008.

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• I write my first draft by hand, at least for fiction. For non-fiction, I write happily on a computer, but for fiction I write by hand, because I'm trying to achieve a kind of thoughtless state, or an unconscious instinctive state. I'm not reading what I write when I wrote. It's an unconscious outpouring that's a mess, and it's many, many steps away from anything anyone would want to read. Creating that way seems to generate the most interesting material for me to work with, though.

  Jennifer Egan

  Reading, Writing, Hands

  Interview with Marah Eakin, www.avclub.com. May 12, 2011.

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• I'm a novelist, I'm not an activist. I'm not a non-fiction writer, I'm not a journalist. I'm not a foodie, I'm not even really an animal person, or an environmentalist. I did the best I could with this, but it's not who I am.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Animal, Who I Am, Novelists

  Interview with Gregg LaGambina, www.avclub.com. November 17, 2009.

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• The most difficult part of writing a book is not devising a plot which will captivate the reader. It's not developing characters the reader will have strong feelings for or against. It is not finding a setting which will take the reader to a place he or she as never been. It is not the research, whether in fiction or non-fiction. The most difficult task facing a writer is to find the voice in which to tell the story.

  Randy Pausch

  Strong, Book, Writing

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• Inspiration comes from so many sources. Music, other fiction, the non-fiction I read, TV shows, films, news reports, people I know, stories I hear, misheard words or lyrics, dreams

  Trudi Canavan

  Dream, Inspiration, Tv Shows

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• In, 1950, at the age, 19 I dropped out of St. George William College in Montreal, as it then was, and sailed for England on the Franconia. Foolishly, no arrogantly, believing I could put Canada and its picayune problems behind me, never dreaming it would become the raw material of most of my fiction and non-fiction. Or that I would care so deeply about its surviving intact.

  Mordecai Richler

  Dream, Believe, College

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• I have long admired the visceral storytelling and moral complexity of John Vaillant’s brilliant non-fiction about humankind’s tragically ambivalent relationship with the natural world. Now he brings his abundant literary gifts to a debut novel set in a very real borderland in which human beings are themselves treated like animals. The Jaguar’s Children is a beautifully rendered lament for an imperiled culture and the brave lives that would preserve it. You should read it.

  John Burnham Schwartz

  Children, Real, Animal

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• I do, however, feel reasonably strongly the sense that the job of a piece of argumentative scholarly non-fiction is not the same as the job of a piece of fiction.

  China Mieville

  Jobs, Fiction, Pieces

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• With non-fiction writing I feel like I'm confined and driven by what actually happened. That makes the "plot". So it's a process of getting all of my notes typed up, then scanning through the notes, trying to extract or find certain vignettes that seem like they might write well - that might have a potential for good energy, shape, etc. And then at some point I start stringing these together, keeping an eye on the word count.

  George Saunders

  Eye, Writing, Trying

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• I've always felt that no one understands why some books of non-fiction endure and some don't, because there's not much understanding among many non-fiction writers that the narrative is terribly important.

  Robert Caro

  Book, Understanding, Important

  "The Round Table: Fiction, Biography And The Use Of Power". Interview with Kurt Vonnegut, www.robertcaro.com. 1999.

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• In my opinion there are two basic questions that any writer tries to answer. "What is?" is the question non-fiction asks. "What if?" is the question fiction asks. That's the question I'm more interested in.

  Patrick Rothfuss

  Two, What If, Trying

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• I don't write non-fiction because I get bored. Some of my writing is autobiographical, but not the way readers imagine. I use my memory of settings, events and people. I weave history into my stories, but my narratives are made up.

  Sefi Atta

  Memories, Writing, Bored

  Source: www.percontra.net

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• I came to fantasy fairly late. For some ten years, I had been happily writing fiction and non-fiction for adults. But I always loved fantasy, whether for adults or young people; and at that particular point in my life, I wanted to try it, to understand it, as part of the process of learning to be a writer. The results were beyond anything I could have foreseen. As I've said often and elsewhere, it was the most creative and liberating experience of my life.

  Lloyd Alexander

  Writing, Years, People

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• I like to think that one of things I've done with non-fiction since the very beginning is to find new ways of telling true stories.

  Errol Morris

  Thinking, Fiction, Stories

  Source: collider.com

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• There is really no fiction or non-fiction; there is only narrative. One mode of perception has no greater claim on the truth than the other; that the distance has perhaps to do with distance - narrative distance - from the characters; it has to do with the kind of voice that is talking, but it certainly hasn't to do with the common distribution between fact and imagination.

  E. L. Doctorow

  Distance, Character, Voice

  Source: theharvardadvocate.com

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• Any documentary; any capturing of a non-fiction event, is a hyper-realistic condensation of reality that hopefully reveals an emotional truth. It's never the actual literal truth of an event.

  Joe Berlinger

  Reality, Emotional, Events

  Source: povmagazine.com

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• When I read any book, if it's really good I get lost in the writing whether it's fiction or non-fiction. I'm in the story not thinking about who wrote it.

  Jeff Feuerzeig

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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