Quotes About Nonfiction

When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.

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.

I never really understood the idea that nonfiction ought to be this dispensary of data that we have at the moment.

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.

You can tell a more over-the-top incredible story if you use a nonfiction form.

In books, everything had an explanation. She especially liked nonfiction: lots of facts and things had to make sense. If a question came up, eventually you got the answer. Every mystery was solved by the end. Facts fit together. When you wanted something explained, there it was, with no whispering or cold stares or slammed doors.

It's essential for me to be working on a nonfiction sort of research project simultaneous with multiple projects that are in different realms of art practice or not.

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.

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. As for nonfiction, for history, it may be real, but its truth is slippery, hard to access, with no fixed meaning bolted to it. If history doesn't become story, it dies to everyone except the historian.

Writing nonfiction of various kinds has been instructive and entertaining as well as paying the rent.

I love making fiction films as well as nonfiction ones, and hope to keep challenging myself to make better and better work.

Movies feel like work, and reading fiction feels like work, whereas reading nonfiction feels like pleasure.

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.

Leo Tolstoy's nonfiction book The Kingdom of God Is Within You, the culmination of thirty years of reflections on Christianity, was banned in Russia—

I've seen a lot of the United States, having stayed in so many different cities and towns for work. It's such a strange and fascinating country, and instead of learning about it through a textbook, I would rather discover its history and traditions and institutions through fiction and nonfiction writers.

I think one of the reasons that I like fiction versus nonfiction is that I myself can kind of disappear from the story.

The competitions between fiction and nonfiction, short and long, electronic and paper, are not battles in which there can be only one victor. After all, we exist in a world where more kinds of writing than ever are greeted with interest and enthusiasm.

In certain fiction, she perceives truths that she rarely finds in nonfiction; therefore, in her quest to better understand the world and the meaning of her life, she reads those novels that suggest a world of wonders, dark and light, forever unfolding for eyes willing to see.

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

It is true that "atheism" is a negative word, but so is "nonfiction." They are double negatives. Both words tell you that what you are getting is real, not pretend. Those of

To reconstruct stories and scenes, nonfiction writers must conduct vigorous and responsible research. In fact, narrative requires more research than traditional reportage, for writers cannot simply tell what they learn and know; rather, they must show it.

The writer of nonfiction might be starting with events that really happened, but recreating them is an imaginative feat. Ordering them is an imaginative feat. Making sense of them is an imaginative feat." —Robin Hemley

Norman Maclean called A River Runs Through It fiction, and the word "fiction" appeared in the book's front matter. A River Runs Through It was autobiographical fact in nearly all aspects but one. For private reasons, the author had shifted the site of his brother's murder and, being Norman Maclean, considered that change and others quite enough fabrication to disqualify the text as nonfiction.

But that's what nonfiction is, people. Shitty feelings and encounters with death.