Nonfiction Quotes - Page 3

• My favourite all-time work of fiction: Lord of the Rings. My favourite all-time nonfiction book: Guns, Germs, and Steel. Ask me again next week, you'll get a different answer.

  Orson Scott Card

  Book, Gun, Next Week

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• Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Different, Fiction

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Sep 23, 2011

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• As I started to read nonfiction in the mid '70s, I discovered, holy cow, there was a lot of imaginative nonfiction. Not the kind where people use composite characters and invented quotes. I hate that kind of nonfiction. But imaginative in the sense that good writing and unexpected structure and vivid reporting could be combined with presenting facts.

  David Quammen

  Hate, Writing, Character

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• 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.

  Yann Martel

  Real, Emotional, Fiction

  Yann Martel (2010). “Beatrice and Virgil”, p.16, Canongate Books

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• I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.

  E. L. Doctorow

  Fiction, Narrative, Distinction

  E.L. Doctorow (2011). “Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution:: Selected Essays, 1977-1992”, p.160, Random House

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• When you deal with nonfiction you deal with human characters.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Character, Deals, Humans

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• We like nonfiction, and we live in fictitious times.

  Michael Moore

  2003 Oscar Acceptance Address for Best Documentary Film, delivered 23 March 2003, Hollywood, CA

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• I read the same amount of nonfiction and fiction.

  Anne Lamott

  Fiction, Fiction And Nonfiction, Amount

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• Nonfiction-wha t the hell, that just says, this is nongrapefruit we're having this morning.

  John McPhee

  Morning, Hell

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• Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Book, Writing, Doubt

  Barbara Kingsolver (2011). “High Tide in Tucson”, p.160, Faber & Faber

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• Creative nonfiction writers do not make things up; they make ideas and information that already exist more interesting and often more accessible.

  Lee Gutkind

  Creative Nonfiction, Ideas, Interesting

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• Politically I also don't believe anymore that we can only have one voice to a story, it's like having one radio station to represent a country. You want the politics of any complicated situation to be complicated in a book of fiction or nonfiction.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Country, Believe, Book

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Nonfiction writers are second-class citizens, the Ellis Island of literature. We just can't quite get in. And yes, it pisses me off.

  William Styron

  Islands, Class, Citizens

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• After the Dance was my first attempt at nonfiction. I'd never really participated in carnival, and I really wanted to go. It sounded like a wonderfully fun thing to do. And I wanted to write something happy about Haiti, something celebratory. And going to carnival gave me a chance to do that, because it is one of the instances in Haiti when people shed their class separation and come together.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Fun, Writing, Class

  Interview David Barsamian, progressive.org. October 1, 2003.

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• Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.

  Virginia Woolf

  Two, Imagination, Fiction

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.3718, Delphi Classics

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• I often read nonfiction, and some of my ideas begin there.

  Will Hobbs

  Ideas

  Source: scholar.lib.vt.edu

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• I never wanted to be an editor. I never wanted to be a boss. I just wanted to write, and it didn't make any difference whether it was fiction or nonfiction or short stories or whatever. I just - that's what I was destined to do.

  Frank Deford

  Writing, Editors, Differences

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

  Chad Harbach

  Different, Fiction, Process

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• I read nonfiction almost exclusively - both for research and also for pleasure. When I read fiction, it's almost always in the thriller genre, and it needs to rivet me in the opening few chapters.

  Dan Brown

  Needs, Fiction, Research

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• In the best nonfiction, it seems to me, you're always made aware that you are being engaged with a supple mind at work. The story line or plot in nonfiction consists of the twists and turns of a thought process working itself out.

  Phillip Lopate

  Mind, Twists, Plot

  Phillip Lopate (2013). “To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction”, p.12, Simon and Schuster

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• I haven't written a whole lot of nonfiction, but what I have written leads me to believe that it's an entirely different muscle. The ongoing paradox is that sometimes it's harder to get to the emotional truth of something when you only have the facts at your disposal.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Believe, Emotional, Different

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I've been making 16mm urban landscape films about San Francisco for many years. I choose different nonfiction themes to investigate and am generally interested in surfacing lesser-known histories. I like to investigate and illuminate these histories, combining them with my own unconventional storytelling style, which is generally a stream-of-consciousness voiceover involving a steady stream of personal reflections on pining over unavailable women.

  Jenni Olson

  Reflection, Years, San Francisco

  "Sundance Women Directors: Meet Jenni Olson – ‘The Royal Road’". Interview with Laura Berger, www.indiewire.com. January 25, 2015.

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• All I really know in nonfiction is that when I come home, I've got all these notes and I'm trying to figure out what actually happened to me. I usually kind of know what happened, but as you work through the notes, you find that certain scenes write well and some don't even though they should. Those make a constellation of meaning that weirdly ends up telling you what you just went through. It's a slightly different process, but still there's mystery because when you're bearing down on the scenes, sometimes you find out they mean something different than what you thought.

  George Saunders

  Home, Writing, Mean

  Source: therumpus.net

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• As a writer who writes poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, I think it's important to always maintain a firm grasp on genre and ethics.

  Kathleen Rooney

  Writing, Thinking, Important

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I more seriously considered publishing it under a pseudonym than I considered publishing it as fiction. I think the decision to write it as nonfiction happened at the very outset of the process, because the overwhelming impetus for writing this book was to understand what the experience meant, and to override my own reductions and rationalizations, whatever story I had that was not true. It didn't sit well with me and I needed to answer that. That's sort of the reason I write everything.

  Melissa Febos

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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