Nonfiction Quotes - page 2

When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies. (Irvine Welsh)
I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century. View quote
Tom Wolfe
Nonfiction is never going to die. View quote
Tom Wolfe
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. View quote
Orson Scott Card
For something like forty years I've been getting various sorts of narratives off my chest without being able to hit upon a classification for them. There's something dreary to me about the publisher's arbitrary division of every word written for publication into fiction and nonfiction. My writing has a most irritating way of being difficult to classify in either category. At times I would find it hard to tell you whether the stuff is prose or verse. Gradually I've come up with the tag: contemporary chronicle. View quote
John Dos Passos
I like to get paid for doing basic research, so it's pleasant to write some nonfiction about it. View quote
Bruce Sterling
Rushdie had written a book of nonfiction which offered critical but decided support to the Nicaraguan revolution. He had also been eloquent about the rights of the ever-relegated Palestinians. What more natural, when he was threatened with assassination by contract, than to jubilate about a terrorist-symp who had been caught in his own logic? I counted some ten newspaper and magazine columns from the Podhoretz school, all making this same point in the same words - demonstrating the impressive Zhdanovite discipline that is the special mark of the faction. All of them seemed to regard the affair as some sort of heavenly revenge for the sin of radical promiscuity; much as they have represented the AIDS crisis as a vengeance as on sixties morality. The ethical nullity of these positions never got beyond mere gloating, and will one day help to illustrate the essential distinction between irony and brutish sarcasm. View quote
Christopher Hitchens
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. View quote
William Zinsser
In nonfiction, you have that limitation, that constraint, of telling the truth. View quote
Peter Matthiessen
The hardest piece of nonfiction I ever wrote isn't anywhere close to the easiest piece of fiction I never wrote. View quote
Ann Patchett
When you're researching things that have happened, the clear narrative arc is not there already. This is the problem of writing nonfiction for me - writing nonfiction which is about serious subjects and has serious political and social points to make, yet which is meant to be popular to a degree - what happens when the facts don't fit a convenient narrative arc? I guess that for a lot of nonfiction writers that is a central challenge. (Misha Glenny)
I've been a lifelong horror fan, but at the same time, I would say 90 percent of my reading is biographies and nonfiction history. View quote
Seth Grahame-Smith
Nonfiction writers are the packhorses of literature. We're meant to carry the story. If we can make it up and down the mountain by a reliable if not scenic route, we have delivered. Technique is optional. View quote
Stacy Schiff
While I love to read contemporary fiction, I'm not drawn to writing it. Perhaps it's because the former journalist in me is too inhibited by the press of reality; when I think about writing of my own time I always think about nonfiction narratives. Or perhaps it's just that I find the present too confounding. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction. View quote
Joan D. Vinge
I write funny nonfiction adventure books about crazy, serious worlds. View quote
Jon Ronson
Ah, well, I have no talent for nonfiction, that's my problem. View quote
Jonathan Coe
I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction. View quote
Judith Krantz
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. View quote
Douglas Preston
In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that. View quote
Aleksandar Hemon
Nonfiction is both easier and harder to write than fiction. It's easier because the facts are already laid out before you, and there is already a narrative arc. What makes it harder is that you are not free to use your imagination and creativity to fill in any missing gaps within the story. (Amy Bloom)
From an early age, my favorite thing to read was novels. For years, when I was writing only nonfiction, still I was reading almost exclusively novels. It's weird to be producing something that you don't consume. It feels really alienating. View quote
Elif Batuman
Imagination is really dependent on memory and observation, these things that we think of as part of nonfiction writing, actually. View quote
Elif Batuman
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. View quote
Carl Hiaasen
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. View quote
Lisa Scottoline