Quotes About Non-fiction

Basically, I think of fiction and non-fiction as different ways of engaging with the world. You reach a point where you feel you have said all you possibly can, in reportage or a review essay or a reflection on history, which 'From the Ruins of Empire' was.

Wow! your book is a tour de force the research that you must have done to cover such a huge amount of years is amazing I loved the book you are a natural born story teller. I will give the book a week to settle in and then give it a review on Amazon. I wrote several non-fiction books but then decided to try fiction and I found it was my drug of choice. I hope to ready your next book soon. Lots of love and congratulations.!

I'm a reluctant writer of non-fiction, in part because I don't really feel qualified.

Because I'm such a creative person, and I've always got my nose in a book, I suppose it was only a matter of time before non-fiction turned into fiction again. But I never consciously set out to become a writer and I never thought I'd be doing the things I'm doing today.

I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.

Creative non-fiction is such a liberating genre because it allows the non-fiction writer, whether he or she be journalist or essayist, to use all of the techniques of the fiction writer and all of the ideas, creative approaches, that fiction writers get a chance to use, but they have to use it in a true story.

I love the opportunity to just let my imagination run riot! Non-fiction can be very restrictive.

See, I have no journalism in my background, so I wasn't practised at research or writing non-fiction, nor at handling the truth in a journalistic way. Journalists know when to call a halt and write something, but I kept on looking for answers.

I'm very fickle when it comes to genre. I read YA, non-fiction, mysteries, romance. I'll read anything that comes with a strong recommendation.

I wasn't trained to write non-fiction.

Chinese readers are buying books in translation, particularly non-fiction about China, in large numbers.

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.

One of the paradoxes of writing is that when you write non-fiction everyone tries to prove that it's wrong, and when you publish fiction, everyone tries to see the truth in it.

Peter Fleming was a famous English traveler, explorer and adventurer, whose non-fiction books were hugely successful. My father owned signed copies of all of them - he and Peter Fleming had become acquainted over some detail of set design at the Korda film studio in Shepperton - and I had read each of them with breathless adolescent excitement.

In non-fiction, I found John Gardner's two writing books to be tremendously helpful.

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I write non-fiction quicker, and I write it on a computer. Fiction I write longhand, and that helps make it clear that it comes from a slightly different part of the brain, I think.

If the memoirist is borrowing narrative techniques from fiction, shouldn't the novelist borrow a few tricks from successful non-fiction?

The name of the album is 'Non-Fiction'. And, I'm calling it that because the name of every song on this album is derived from a true story. Now, some of the stories are mine. Some of the stories belong to some of my fans.

Many people have observed that truth is stranger than fiction. This has led some intellectuals to conclude that it's stranger than non-fiction as well.

Anything by D. H. Lawrence or Jean Genet - 'Zen Mind,' 'Beginner's Mind' is my daily go to for non-fiction.

Historians turning their hands to fiction are all the rage. Since Alison Weir led the way in 2006, an ever-growing number of established non-fiction writers - Giles Milton, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Harry Sidebottom, Patrick Bishop, Ian Mortimer and myself included - have written historical novels.

I spend most of my time reading non-fiction of all sorts. Then poetry. Then fiction to blurb. Then fiction I want to read.

All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.