Top 105 Nonfiction Quotes

I view myself as a fiction writer who just happens to write nonfiction. I think I look at the world through a fiction-writer’s eyes.

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.

Short fiction and the novel, nonfiction and fiction, electronic texts and books – these are not opposites. One need not destroy the other to survive.

I consider myself a writer, foremost – a nonfiction writer.

Like all art, nonfiction film should invite, seduce, or force us to confront the most difficult, frightening or mysterious aspects of what it means to be human.

Whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, writing takes me to another world.

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

I hardly read fiction; I mostly read nonfiction. I like to examine material things.

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.

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.

I’m very, very leery of nonfiction books where they change timeframes and use – what do they call those things? – composite characters. I don’t think that’s right.

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

I find that nonfiction writers are the likeliest to turn out interesting novels.

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.

I’m working on a nonfiction book on Nepal and a novel about diasporas.

‘First Light’ is nonfiction, a true story about astronomers who are looking for light coming from the edge of the universe. It tells how science is really done – and science is a lot weirder and more human than most people realize.

Peoria is such a seemingly quintessential American city, and I had always wanted to draw on that in either my fiction or in nonfiction. The Midwest is also a landscape that I have always been infatuated with, perhaps because it’s the first one I can truly remember.

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.

I’ve seen a lot of the United States, having stayed in so many different cities and towns for work. It’s such a strange and fascinating country, and instead of learning about it through a textbook, I would rather discover its history and traditions and institutions through fiction and nonfiction writers.

It’s rare for me to read any fiction. I almost only read nonfiction. I don’t believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures. People who call reading detective fiction or eating dessert a guilty pleasure make me want to puke.

Essentially, I’m a storyteller, and I make my living by telling stories, be they music or nonfiction or fiction.

I do think that narrative, long-form nonfiction is the perfect form because it’s rooted in something very real, but we’re also, you know, completely spiritual, emotional creatures driven by all sorts of desires and needs.

My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me.

I have written a considerable amount – both fiction and nonfiction – about the Caribbean. My love for this part of the world is centered on a deep admiration for its people – a people who are both tough and romantic, dreamers and cynics, people who face a thousand defeats and are never defeated.

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

We still go to nonfiction for content. And if it’s well-written, that’s a bonus. But we don’t often talk about the nonfiction work of art. That’s what I’m very interested in.

I’ve found that in fiction – and this is just the kind of writer I am – I can’t really work from an outline. I have a vague idea of the characters at the beginning of the book, and then I have a vague idea of whatever the end of the book will be, but I can’t approach creative nonfiction like that.

The first thing I tried to write was a novel, when I took that time off in grad school. Then I didn’t finish it. I went back to school, and then I started writing nonfiction kind of by accident.

There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.

I write both fiction and nonfiction. I begin my fiction with the main character. The story comes later.

I never really considered writing something that was nonfiction.

Nonfiction, to me, feels like an argument, whereas a novel is like a series of questions.

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

Truth is stranger than nonfiction. And life is too interesting to be left to journalists. People have stories, but journalists have ‘takes,’ and it’s their takes that usually win out when the stories are too complicated or, as happens, not complicated enough.

Robert Mapplethorpe asked me to write our story the day before he died. I had never written a book of nonfiction, and so it took me almost two decades to write that book.

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

Ironically, in today’s marketplace successful nonfiction has to be unbelievable, while successful fiction must be believable.

I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century.

I have written two nonfiction books, I’m embarrassed to say.

I discovered that I, a writer of what is known as creative nonfiction, could do the research and bridge the gap in my books and lectures through true storytelling. This is not ‘dumbing down’ or writing for eighth graders. It is writing for readers across cultures, age barriers, social and political landscapes.

The notion that anything can be invented wholly and that these invented things are classified as ‘fiction’ and that other writing, presumably not made up, is called ‘nonfiction’ strikes me as a very arbitrary separation of things.

I find now I’m reading a lot more nonfiction, simply because every time I read fiction, I think I can write it better. But every time I read nonfiction, I learn things.

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.

I love making fiction films as well as nonfiction ones, and hope to keep challenging myself to make better and better work.

To reconstruct stories and scenes, nonfiction writers must conduct vigorous and responsible research. In fact, narrative requires more research than traditional reportage, for writers cannot simply tell what they learn and know; rather, they must show it.

My job, in general, is nonfiction, so writing fiction was liberating. If you can’t find the answer to something, you just make it up!

After starting as a journalist for newspapers and magazines, I began to write books and had success with a novel and four nonfiction books for young adults.

I write and teach creative nonfiction. I was a reporter.

I wanted to make a late-night-type show that happened to be in the morning for moms. Bravo was more interested in a blend of my books ‘Momzillas’ and ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Nut,’ which is a collection of nonfiction essays.

I’m not sure what to call ‘Lego Star Wars: The Visual Dictionary.’ Nonfiction? Movie/toy fiction? But it is any Lego/’Star Wars’ kid’s dream. Call it spectacular.

Every time I write a nonfiction book I get sued.

Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, I’ve never had the sense I was ‘making up’ a character. It feels more like watching people reveal themselves, ever more deeply, more intimately.

I started off doing fiction in 1993. It didn’t occur to me to do nonfiction because it wasn’t a thing yet. So I was bumbling around, writing short stories, and then I took a nonfiction workshop, and I realized that this was what I was supposed to do.

Great brands and great businesses have to be great storytellers, too. We have to tell stories – emotive, compelling stories – and even more so because we’re nonfiction.

Writing nonfiction of various kinds has been instructive and entertaining as well as paying the rent.

In 1982, when I was almost 26 years old, I decided I wanted to write fiction. I’d majored in journalism in college, and I’d always assumed I would write nonfiction.

I don’t actually have a one wellspring of inspiration. Though I’m most often inspired while reading – both fiction and nonfiction.

Maybe I’ll work for a label someday, write some fiction, nonfiction. Someday I’d like to go back to school and get my teaching degree. I want to be a grandpa. I want to have more kids.