Top 70 Non-Fiction Quotes

When you’re writing non-fiction, you go as far as you can go, and then ethically you have to stop. You can’t go. You can’t suppose. You can’t imagine. And I think there’s something in human nature that wants to finish the story.

The challenge in fiction is to write a terrific story. The challenge in journalism is to communicate solid, objective information. The challenge in creative non-fiction is to do it both and to do it well.

I have no interest in non-fiction. I don’t read it and don’t watch it and don’t write it, other than a little journalistic column.

It’s true that I don’t rearrange that much in the fiction, but I feel if you change even one name or the order of one event then you have to call it fiction or you get all the credits of non-fiction without paying the price.

Anything by D. H. Lawrence or Jean Genet – ‘Zen Mind,’ ‘Beginner’s Mind’ is my daily go to for non-fiction.

I read a lot; fiction and non-fiction are the mediums I find most edifying and inspiring. I watch movies and listen to music and take lots and lots of walks. Nature is a nice reset button for me, it’s how I get a lot of thinking done.

I like to read non-fiction on my e-reader, but as for fiction, I usually like to have a copy to keep at home.

I wasn’t trained to write non-fiction.

Before I started writing, I’d never read much fiction. I was more interested in non-fiction. I’m taking the same approach to theatre: I can operate from a position of ignorance and make up my own rules instead of being bound by customs and practice.

I grew up reading Updike. I remember being alarmed to find that he had published short stories by the time he was 22. I think ‘Pigeon Feathers’ was the first collection of stories I read. Only much later did I discover his non-fiction reviewing and art criticism.

Among non-fiction authors I like Richard Bach, Nichiren Daishonin, Burton Watson, Deepak Chopra and MJ Akbar.

In non-fiction, I like Wayne Dyer. I have a compilation of his best quotes near my bed! To me he’s one of the finest authors.

I’m very strict in my belief that non-fiction should be truthful, and fiction is for invented narratives.

If you wanna write non-fiction you have to be interested in the world.

I do read a lot, and I think in recent years the ratio between the amount of non-fiction and fiction has tipped quite considerably. I did read fiction as a teenager as well, mostly because I was forced to read fiction, of course, to go through high school.

Some directors want to make superhero films. That’s what gets them off, and they love it, and they love sci-fi. I prefer putting my hands into non-fiction.

I believe that there is a simple demand and supply rule that works on television. While many are hooked on web series, some enjoy non-fiction. Similarly, there are people who love watching supernatural genre.

Every time a blast happens, people ask, ‘But why would someone do this?’ Weirdly, it hasn’t been answered well anywhere – neither in fiction nor non-fiction.

Probably the biggest influence on my career was the late John Hersey, who, while he was at ‘The New Yorker,’ wrote one of the masterpieces of narrative non-fiction, ‘Hiroshima.’ Hersey was a teacher of mine at Yale, and a friend. He got me to see the possibility of journalism not just as a business but as an art form.

With non-fiction, there is the struggle to be accurate. With fiction, it is a bit different: the desire to let imagination take you to new places.

I’m a professional non-fiction reader, that’s what I do. But in my 20s we had our own vampire and witch moment, courtesy of Anne Rice, whose books I read and loved.

I’ll be writing essays long after I’ve stopped writing fiction. There is this unusually broad range in the non-fiction, but if you look at what I’m capable of as a novelist, I’m more limited.

Historical facts are the vital framework around which non-fiction writers construct their narratives; they are, quite simply, indispensable.

I tend to listen to music more than I read. I need to get into reading a bit more. The stuff I tend to read is usually non-fiction books more than fiction, but I’ve been trying to power my way through Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment,’ and I do enjoy it.

I either like reading fun war-based sci-fi, books about the lives of chefs, or dry historical non-fiction.

I used to write fiction, non-fiction, fiction, non-fiction and have a clear pattern because I’d need a break from one style when going into the next book.

I write non-fiction quicker, and I write it on a computer. Fiction I write longhand, and that helps make it clear that it comes from a slightly different part of the brain, I think.

I read pretty eclectically – fiction, non-fiction, and poetry – and I’ve been inspired and influenced by a number of writers.

We had a few non-fiction books at home, but my dad was of the opinion that fiction was a complete and utter waste of time because it wasn’t real – so what was the point of reading it?

I was looking to do something non-fiction because I had done a strip, ‘My Mom Was a Schizophrenic.’ I really enjoyed the process of doing that strip, despite its subject matter. To do it I’d had to do a lot of research and reading and I figured I’d like to do that again.

‘Ghost City’ was actually one of the few instances of non-fiction that I had written, and I felt that I probably said what I wanted. I think it must be different for every author; I haven’t done very much of it, and perhaps, in a way, I found it rather painful, which is why I don’t really do it very often.

I’ve read pretty broadly on the Holocaust – both fiction and non-fiction – and to me, ‘The Lost Wife’ is one of the best. The horrors of war serve as a backdrop to a love affair that spans a lifetime, and that love story stayed with me long after I put down the book.

I don’t really read non-fiction, but I have grown up on a steady diet of Wodehouse and, of course, science fiction.

Non-fiction is a big responsibility. Rationality. Facts. The urgent need to reflect some small aspect of reality. But fiction is a private autism, a self-referential world in which the writer is omnipotent. Gravity, taxes, and death are mere options, subject to the writer’s fancy.

I teach a non-fiction writing class at New York University, and one of my great pleasures is deciding on the syllabus.

Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.

In my mind, there’s not a great difference between what people call fiction and non-fiction. So in that sense, I’m like an early-18th-century person. I actually believe there’s one way of writing.

Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?

Expand the definition of ‘reading’ to include non-fiction, humor, graphic novels, magazines, action adventure, and, yes, even websites. It’s the pleasure of reading that counts; the focus will naturally broaden. A boy won’t read shark books forever.

I like to read really good books – anything that’s really great, whether it’s fiction, non-fiction, how-to, or whatever.

I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It’s always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.

I mainly read non-fiction, and that’s probably because I have a huge amount of insecurity about my lack of education and the things I don’t know.

‘The Power of Habit’ is the exact kind of non-fiction I love. It’s smart and interesting, and it changes your perception how you do what you do or why you are who you are.

If the memoirist is borrowing narrative techniques from fiction, shouldn’t the novelist borrow a few tricks from successful non-fiction?

But I usually read non-fiction; I love Richard Branson books.

What I’ve always been most interested in is exposing the way stories and fantasies reconstitute our everyday reality. What appears to be non-fiction is not only totally mysterious, unfathomable, and strange when you really look at what it is.

Basically, I think of fiction and non-fiction as different ways of engaging with the world. You reach a point where you feel you have said all you possibly can, in reportage or a review essay or a reflection on history, which ‘From the Ruins of Empire’ was.

I don’t know what that line is between fiction and non-fiction that other people have in their minds, but to me, when I’m writing, it’s just like whatever the next sentence should be is the next sentence. It’s not this artificial division.

I’m interested in non-fiction, but a form of it which is very badly behaved, which doesn’t define itself as straight-ahead journalism or memoir. It blurs boundaries, plays fast and loose with the truth – not to be silly, whimsical or lazy, but to get greater purchase on what it feels like to be alive.

By embracing a label such as ‘non-fiction,’ the creative writing community has signaled to the world that what goes on in this genre is at best utilitarian and at worst an utter mystery. We have segregated the genre from art.