Quotes About Nonfiction

People seem to want to read more nonfiction than fiction.

I am consumed, or I have been consumed, with these issues of motherhood and the way we act out societal expectations and roles. So both my nonfiction and my fiction have been pretty much exclusively about that.

In college, I wrote newspaper articles and songs. Then, on my 21st birthday, I sold my first book. It was a nonfiction book about women pirates - 'Pirates in Petticoats.' After that, I was a book writer for good.

With nonfiction, I had to learn how to be a clear communicator, but it was also a relief to be able to articulate some of my political ideas and beliefs. I also try to do that in my fiction, but I'm more interested in asking questions that lead to more questions, mysteries that lead to more mysteries, rather than immediate answers and solutions.

At least for me, it takes more knowledge to write fiction than nonfiction. At least about someplace that I begin with a lot of ignorance about.

When I'm working on a novel of my own, I try to read mostly nonfiction, although sometimes I break down and peek at something else.

Jim Harrison's novels, John McPhee's nonfiction, Flannery O'Connor's short stories, and the crime novels of John Sandford, Ken Bruen, and T. Jefferson Parker. His books

My 'Rot & Ruin' series is a post-apocalyptic adventure for teens. My 'Joe Ledger' novels are science-based action thrillers for adults. My 'Dead of Night' stories are zombie tales for adults; my 'Pine Deep Trilogy' is classic horror for adults, and I've written nonfiction books on topics ranging from martial arts to folklore.

I knew that a zombie book would not particularly appeal to some of my previous readers, but it was artistically compelling, and being able to do a short nonfiction book about poker was really fun and great.

There is an emerging subgenre of British nonfiction in which journalists from 'The Guardian' fearlessly recount their own derring-do in David-and-Goliath battles waged against omnipotent state interests in the pursuit of Big Important Truths.

In my twenties and early thirties, I wrote three novels, but beginning in my late thirties, I wearied of the mechanics of fiction writing, got interested in collage nonfiction, and have been writing literary collage ever since.

People and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built. Every human event happens somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that somewhere was like.

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner New York Times Bestseller A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of the Year A Boston Globe Best Book of 2016 A Chicago Review of Books Best Nonfiction Book of 2016 A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year A Dallas Morning News Top 10 of 2016

Both types of books - fiction and nonfiction - are a search for story. As a writer and a reader, there's nothing I crave more than a good story!

A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered 'nonfiction.'

My parents read me some typical children's books: 'Green Eggs and Ham,' 'The Little Engine That Could,' 'Peter Rabbit.' But I quickly developed a preference for nonfiction books about baseball and math, by the likes of Bill James and Martin Gardner.

Ironically, in today's marketplace successful nonfiction has to be unbelievable, while successful fiction must be believable.

Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It's the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.

What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully.

The great thing about real life is that it will always surprise you. Nothing ever turns out the way you expect. I suppose that's why I write nonfiction. If this were a movie, the organization would already have traced my number, bugged my phone, and kidnapped my brother. Instead I was being transferred to the publicist and media relations executive for a death cult.

This trifecta turned the book into the best-known nonfiction work of the 1960s. Silent Spring presented the use of DDT as one of the most consequential human interferences in the natural order of things, and the book was intended to make the widest possible public impact.

With fiction, you can take something that bothers you, or that you don't have in clear focus, and you can put it under as much stress as you want. Really get underneath the skin. With nonfiction, you're restricted to what happened.

Even if your novel occurs in an unfamiliar setting in which all the customs and surroundings will seem strange to your reader, it's still better to start with action. The reason for this is simple. If the reader wanted an explanation of milieu, he would read nonfiction. He doesn't want information. He wants a story.

In my experience, copy editors, like the stalwart staff I've worked with and learned from in my 34 years at 'TIME,' are linguistic conservatives - the keepers of the flame ignited by the Strunk-White 'Elements of Style,' published in full in 1957 and chosen by 'TIME' as one of the 100 most influential nonfiction books of the past century.