Quotes About Nonfiction

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.

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.

A novel is like a car—it won't go anywhere until you turn on the engine. The "engine" of both fiction and nonfiction is the point at which the reader makes the decision not to put the book down. The engine should start in the first three pages, the closer to the top of page one the better.

Wilder taught me that what a writer deals with is the unspoken, what people see or sense in silence. It is our job, in nonfiction as well as fiction, to juxtapose words that reveal what previously may have been blinked, and provide insights obscured by convention and shame.

He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.

Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.

I do think that calling a book nonfiction affirms a kind of responsibility to an attempt at truth.

Truth is better than fiction in terms of telling the story.

the challenge of nonfiction is to marry art and truth.

Despite the rising popularity of the downloadable e-text, I still care about physical books, gravitate to handsome editions and pretty dust jackets, and enjoy seeing rows of hardcovers on my shelves. Many people simply read fiction for pleasure and nonfiction for information. I often do myself. But I also think of some books as my friends and I like to have them around. They brighten my life.

I still care about physical books, gravitate to handsome editions and pretty dust jackets, and enjoy seeing rows of hardcovers on my shelves. Many people simply read fiction for pleasure and nonfiction for information. I often do myself. But I also think of some books as my friends and I like to have them around. They brighten my life.

I love to read nonfiction and memoir, but I'm mostly interested in the piece of writing more than the person.

There's different ways to be impacted by truth. One is to read the scriptures. Another is to read other works by other people who have read the scriptures, non fiction for example. Another is to do studies. Another is to go to a place of worship. Another thing is to sit and listen to someone who's speaking. There's all kinds of ways. Another way is to write. About the truth. Discover the struggle through your character.

It was David McCullough's 'The Johnstown Flood' that lit my imagination as to how I might one day go about writing book-length nonfiction, though my favorite of his books is 'Mornings on Horseback,' about the young Teddy Roosevelt.

After starting as a journalist for newspapers and magazines, I began to write books and had success with a novel and four nonfiction books for young adults.

I realized I couldn't have one foot in the fiction world and one foot in the nonfiction world, which is why 'Here I Go Again' is so not me. I didn't graduate from high school in the '90s, I never listened to metal music, and I don't time travel.

look, and I'm sure you'll be amazed at the wealth of great books—usually there are several hundred freebies in virtually every category of fiction and nonfiction, every day of the year. And these aren't just the

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.

I'd like to imagine that "dreamoir" becomes a subgenre of nonfiction, maybe ultimately because I'd love to read many more dreamoirs by other writers - poets and memoirists especially.

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.'

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.

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

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.

The truth is that every writer, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, is trying to write something truly original and that's what I think I'm doing.