Nonfiction Quotations

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!

I grew up reading Stephen King, Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Robert McCammon, Isaac Asimov's nonfiction books, and Roald Dahl.

A nonfiction author has to bring a platform with him - radio, a TV show or some kind of recognizable vehicle to help launch them. And the agent is really necessary to represent all of the business interests of the author.

Because the kind of nonfiction I write has a plot, the events and transactions that make up a life, nonfiction offers me a break from plotting.

Writing a nonfiction story is like cracking a safe. It seems impossible at the beginning, but once you're in, you're in.

I've long been interested in the role of 'minor characters' in major events. This has been the focus of a lot of the fiction and nonfiction I've written.

For my books of nonfiction I write about subjects I find fascinating. I've been a Yankees and a Lou Gehrig fan for decades, so I wrote 'Lou Gehrig: The Luckiest Man.' It's more the story of his great courage than of his baseball playing. Children face all sorts of challenges, and it's my hope that some will be inspired by the courage of Lou Gehrig.

Fiction is harder for me than nonfiction - more gratifying, as a result, when it succeeds.

Generally, I read nonfiction. There's very little fiction that I enjoy enough to spend my time reading. I am generally a nonfiction guy.

I don't read much nonfiction because the nonfiction I do read always seems to be so badly written. What I enjoy about fiction - the great gift of fiction - is that it gives language an opportunity to happen.

When your work is nonfiction about low-income communities, pretty much anything that's not nonfiction about low-income communities feels like a guilty pleasure.

When you deal with nonfiction you deal with human characters.

There's always a slight tension when you sell a book to Hollywood, especially a nonfiction book. The author wants his story told intact; the nonfiction author wants it told accurately.

In this time of the Internet and nonfiction, to be on an actual bookshelf in an actual bookstore is exciting in itself.

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.

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.

I wrote six nonfiction books before getting into narrative fiction with 'Robopocalypse,' including 'How to Survive a Robot Uprising.' My goal all along was to start writing fiction, and I guess one day I'd just had enough.

I come from a family of writers. My mom had been a writer, nonfiction books, and her mother was a playwright in the 1930s and '40s. And my twin brother, Alexi, is a writer on 'The Following.'

Everyone else thinks I'm a nonfiction writer. I think it's because my nonfiction is easier to find. But I write both in equal measure. I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself, and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you.

My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.

People seem to read so much more nonfiction than fiction, and so it always gives me great pleasure to introduce a friend or family member to a novel I believe they'll cherish but might not otherwise have thought to pick up and read.

I've written many nonfiction books, but that's a special gift.

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.

The challenge for a nonfiction writer is to achieve a poetic precision using the documents of truth but somehow to make people and places spring to life as if the reader was in their presence.

I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction.

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.

I read a lot of nonfiction - especially books about the brain.

I don't read that many novels, I'm more of a nonfiction fan.

I'm open to reading almost anything - fiction, nonfiction - as long as I know from the first sentence or two that this is a voice I want to listen to for a good long while. It has much to do with imagery and language, a particular perspective, the assured knowledge of the particular universe the writer has created.

Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.

It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.

It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.

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

I read the same amount of nonfiction and fiction.

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

Through his long, productive career, Paul Theroux has mixed nonfiction books about exotic travel with novels set in exotic places. Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, Honduras - he lives in and writes about places most of us never see.

Nonfiction, qua label, is nothing more or less than a very flexible (easily breakable) frame that allows you to pull the thing away from narrative and toward contemplation, which is all I've ever wanted.

To me, the moment you're talking about nonfiction you're talking about reality.

For me, a memoir is nonfiction and nonfiction has to be absolutely true.

In reference works, as in sin, omission is as bad as willful misbehavior.

People seem to want to read more nonfiction than fiction.

One important idea I hope is reflected in 'The Poe Shadow' is that fiction can add as much to history as nonfiction does.

Nonfiction takes no liberty with the facts. The trouble with book publishers is that they don't have the staff or they don't want to have the staff to ensure the veracity of a writer. ... My wife is going to hate me for this, but that is what I believe.

My father, Raymond F. Yates, was a successful writer of technical nonfiction and such a life seemed a reasonable alternative to real work.

One of the odder byways of nonfiction is the dishy memoir by those who have served the great or the near-great.

I enjoy writing nonfiction the most because one is limited only by one's imagination. Autobiography is tough.

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.

The American war-writing tradition is a proud one and booming in this era of the Global War on Terror - at least in the nonfiction realm. Hundreds of memoirs and press accounts from Iraq and Afghanistan have been published since 9/11.

Writing nonfiction has been my most serious education, and for all those years it kept me from even glancing in the direction of despair.

People respect nonfiction but they read novels.

But I don't read a lot of fiction. I prefer the nonfiction stuff.

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.

When I write nonfiction, it's always absolutely true. There will be no moment in my nonfiction where I have made something up and have to apologize to the bullying hostess of a talk show.

This was more difficult, ... because with Griffith, there was a story line. This was a piece of nonfiction information that I had to weave together.

(Blank) is such a distinguished figure in nonfiction cinema. To have him coming to our festival is an incredible honor to us, and a great opportunity to the community to have such a great artist in town.

Beast Books will be longer than conventional long-form magazine articles but shorter than conventional nonfiction books. They will be published digitally and distributed on multiple platforms, and will soon thereafter be available as handy paperbacks.

C-SPAN2 has a new Book TV show that features interviews with nonfiction authors, so it has turned a full-size bus into a fully contained television studio. They take it to big book events to let people know about their new show, and we're now one of the largest book sales in the Southeast, if not the nation.

I sometimes think that we fiction writers lag behind nonfiction counterparts in adventurousness, willingness to tackle forgotten areas of history but... we get there in the end.

I used to be a freelance journalist, so I had to write fast, but I always found writing nonfiction constraining. I like the freedom of fiction, where I get to invent everything, and tidy, conclusive endings are within my control.

People sometimes ask me why I wrote this as a novel instead of as a nonfiction book, ... It's because the terrain that I'm exploring, the emotions, aren't documented, as is the case in most marriages. The private thoughts aren't known and that's what I wanted to pursue here. I took it to my imagination and to the skills of fiction writing in order to write about this marriage.

For me in my twenties, working in Hollywood was confusing in that the differences between what was fiction and what was nonfiction seemed to blur in my mind. Everything became a visual memory for me. I carried my Leica camera, giving opportunity to take pictures from my view.

It's certainly a cliche to remark that a nonfiction book 'reads just like a novel,' but in the case of Jonathan Eig's 'The Birth of the Pill,' I have no other recourse, since his narrative is full of larger-than-life characters sharply limned and embarked on fascinating doings, their story told in sprightly visual fashion.

I wanted to be a writer, but I kind of wanted to be a fiction writer someday, like 20 - 25 years down the line. I never thought I'd write a nonfiction memoir about Iraq.

I've written fiction... but the nonfiction has always received the most attention.

The two endorsements I'm most proud of come from Isabel Wilkerson and Toni Morrison. The latter is the greatest American fiction writer of our time, and the former is on her way to being the greatest American nonfiction writer of our time.

I'm trying to write a nonfiction book at the moment, slot it in between the novels, and it really is like wading through quicksand compared to writing fiction.

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.

If uncovering the truth is the greatest challenge of nonfiction writing, it is also the greatest reward.

In terms of going back and forth between fiction and nonfiction - in which I'll include memoir, biography, and true crime - is that one relieves the other.

I realized I couldn't have one foot in the fiction world and one foot in the nonfiction world, which is why 'Here I Go Again' is so not me. I didn't graduate from high school in the '90s, I never listened to metal music, and I don't time travel.

I read all of the nonfiction that I could find on Chechnya, and all the while, I was searching for a novel that was set there. I couldn't find a single novel written in English that was set in the period of the two most recent Chechen wars.

I read a little bit of nonfiction and a lot of poetry. I think of poetry as my shot of whiskey when I don't have time to savor a whole bottle of wine.

I don't like to read nonfiction. To me, fact is something I can look up.

Most books aren't pure nonfiction or fiction.

We like nonfiction, and we live in fictitious times,

My work was entirely nonfiction.

Their living room is lined floor-to-ceiling with religious and nonfiction books. They, like many younger, educated Bangladeshi, are more overtly devout than their parents. They are more educated about the tenets of their religion.

An author's ability to bring a marketing synopsis to the table - along with a great manuscript - makes a difference in what books get picked up. This is true for both fiction and nonfiction titles. You need to show your publisher what you've got in your marketing arsenal.

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

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.

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

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

Every time I write a nonfiction book I get sued.

the challenge of nonfiction is to marry art and truth.

I don't think the potential for comics in nonfiction has been exploited nearly as much as it could be.

Nonfiction is never going to die.

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

I don't have time to read nonfiction.