Quotes About Nonfiction

I've always considered myself a nonfiction artist.

I'm very, very leery of nonfiction books where they change timeframes and use - what do they call those things? - composite characters. I don't think that's right.

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.

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.

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

One of the odder byways of nonfiction is the dishy memoir by those who have served the great or the near-great.

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.

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.

I don't read much nonfiction because the nonfiction I do read always seems to be so badly written. What I enjoy about fiction - the great gift of fiction - is that it gives language an opportunity to happen.

I do think that narrative, long-form nonfiction is the perfect form because it's rooted in something very real, but we're also, you know, completely spiritual, emotional creatures driven by all sorts of desires and needs.

A lot of my nonfiction is very strong environmental stories - I was the first guy to write about the dolphin killings in Japan.

The thing I always tell my writing students - I'm not a full-time instructor, by any means, but periodically I've taught writing students - what I always tell them is that the most important thing in narrative nonfiction is that you not only have to have all the research; you have to have about 100% more than you need.

I can't even imagine writing nonfiction by hand. I think if I didn't have a computer, I just couldn't do it. Maybe it's a brain-section issue.

If you're reading a novel that was written in 1964, you'll find out more about 1964 than if you're reading a nonfiction book written in 1964 because you're hearing how language was actually used and hearing what people's actual concerns were at the beginning of the 1960s.

People sometimes say hoaxes are about the blurry line between nonfiction and fiction. I just don't think it's a blurry line at all.

I consider myself a writer, foremost - a nonfiction writer.

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.

I have this long-running idea that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is not just, 'Did it happen or didn't it happen?' It's one of form.

Every time I wrote fiction, I was discouraged, and every time I wrote nonfiction, I was encouraged.

I've been writing since 1973. I've written nonfiction things of that nature, but I'm probably best known for crime fiction and, to some extent, horror fiction.

My job, in general, is nonfiction, so writing fiction was liberating. If you can't find the answer to something, you just make it up!

I tend not to read fiction - I'll read one novel a year during the summer - but I do read a lot of nonfiction.

You do nonfiction, you get to meet people you would not normally meet.

I'm working on a nonfiction book on Nepal and a novel about diasporas.