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

  John McPhee

  Morning, Hell

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

  Chad Harbach

  Different, Fiction, Process

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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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• 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 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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• Nonfiction narratives are really powerful and valid in themselves. But one thing that you don't get sometimes from the more clinical or academic books or nonfiction books is that you don't get to hear the person's voice; you don't get them as individuals. You get a few quotes and you hear them as sort of a case study: numbers, examples, anecdotes, maybe a paragraph here, and that's about it.

  Dave Eggers

  Powerful, Book, Voice

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• 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.

  Drew Gilpin Faust

  Book, Hands, Smell

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• I am far less interested in serving as a change agent than in functioning as a prose artist, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Artist, Fiction, Agents

  Source: www.terrain.org

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• When I'm writing fiction I'm thinking, God, this is so hard - I have to make all this stuff up! I wish I were writing a nonfiction book where all the facts are laid out and I don't have to be so much at sea.

  Douglas Preston

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  "The Power of Two: Bonus Outtakes From WD Interview With Lincoln Child & Douglas Preston". Interview with Brian A. Klems, www.writersdigest.com. January 12, 2012.

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