Nonfiction Quotes - page 4

It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer. (E. O. Wilson)

People respect nonfiction but they read novels.

E. O. Wilson

I don't read for amusement, I read for enlightenment. I do a lot of reviewing, so I have a steady assignment of reading. I'm also a judge for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which gives awards to literature and nonfiction.

Joyce Carol Oates

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

Joyce Carol Oates

It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.

Erica Jong

To be creative means to connect. It's to abolish the gap between the body, the mind and the soul, between science and art, between fiction and nonfiction.

Nawal El Saadawi

Fiction and nonfiction accomplish very different things, but they can overlap. I wanted my fiction to seem nonfictional, and my nonfiction to seem fictional. At the same time, in fiction I could say things I couldn't get away with in nonfiction without footnotes. And in nonfiction, I could make things explicit that I couldn't say in fiction because of the viewpoint of my protagonist.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

Nonfiction is more personal for me. It's more personal in that it's more direct, and actually it's always been more direct, even when I first started doing pieces.

Joan Didion

I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.

Joan Didion

You can tell a more over-the-top incredible story if you use a nonfiction form. (Chuck Palahniuk)

I come from a little island with the Caribbean Sea on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. I come from, really, nowhere, and for me, the fiction and the nonfiction, creative or otherwise, all come from the same place.

Jamaica Kincaid

I read the same amount of nonfiction and fiction.

Anne Lamott

I've written six novels and four pieces of nonfiction, so I don't really have a genre these days.

Anne Lamott

I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.

Jonathan Franzen

I coauthored my first nonfiction book by the time I was 25. I have been involved in nonfiction documentaries, newspapers, TV and internet since that time.

Julian Assange

Whenever you have two characters in a book, whether it's a novel or nonfiction, you run the risk that the reader is going to like one more than the other. They're going to read one chapter and say, 'I can't wait to get back to the other guy.'

Mitch Albom

I find interesting characters or lessons that resonate with people and sometimes I write about them in the sports pages, sometimes I write them in a column, sometimes in a novel, sometimes a play or sometimes in nonfiction. But at the core I always say to myself, 'Is there a story here? Is this something people want to read?'

Mitch Albom

I contend that in the kind of nonfiction I write, and that other people also pursue, anything is permissible provided the reader knows what you're taking liberties with.

William Least Heat-Moon

I've always read broadly: literary fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, chick lit, historical, dystopian, nonfiction, memoir. I've even read Westerns. I prefer female protagonists.

Sandra Cisneros

In fiction, when you paint yourself into a corner, you can write a pair of suction cups onto the bottoms of your shoes and walk up the wall and out the skylight and see the sun breaking through the clouds. In nonfiction, you don't have that luxury. (Tom Robbins)

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.

Ayelet Waldman

Every time I get through the work on a book of nonfiction, I say I'll never do it again; it takes so much out of you.

Dave Eggers

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

If you write nonfiction, a historical account of what really happened, first of all, it's always white men who do that, and you don't have the voices that are really interesting to me, of the people who are not sheltered by the big umbrella of the establishment.

Isabel Allende

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