45+ Authentic Nonfiction Quotes That Will Unlock Your True Potential

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 used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority.

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.

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

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

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

My platform has been to reach reluctant readers.

And one of the best ways I found to motivate them is to connect them with reading that interests them, to expand the definition of reading to include humor, science fiction/fantasy, nonfiction, graphic novels, wordless books, audio books and comic books.

The difference between fiction and nonfiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable.

I would write light entertainment nonfiction pieces during the day, then come home and work on my fantasy fiction. It was very difficult to get out of the one mindset and into another one.

He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.

I enjoy the writings of all of these authors and they have been very inspirational for me. But I think that it is important as writers of metaphysical, New Age, occult fiction and nonfiction to not take ourselves too seriously.

Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction;

the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.

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

I read the same amount of nonfiction and fiction.

People respect nonfiction but they read novels.

Usually I read several books at a time - old books, new books, fiction, nonfiction, verse, anything - and when the bedside heap of a dozen volumes or so has dwindled to two or three, which generally happens by the end of one week, I accumulate another pile.

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.

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.

There's no division on my bookshelf between fiction and nonfiction.

As far as I'm concerned, fiction is about the truth.

Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling.

For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.

When I was young I believed that "nonfiction" meant "true.

" But you read a history written in, say, 1920 and a history of the same events written in 1995 and they're very different. There may not be one Truth - there may be several truths - but saying that is not to say that reality doesn't exist.

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

I do 30 to 40 books a year, so it's a fair amount of reading.

Back and forth between nonfiction and fiction. I usually have three or four things that are open on my desk, on my bed, on audiobook in the car.

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.

Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book.

There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.

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.

Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.

It's very bad to write a novel by act of will.

I can do a book of nonfiction work that way - just sign the contract and do the book because, provided the topic has some meaning for me, I know I can do it. But a novel is different. A novel is more like falling in love. You don't say, 'I'm going to fall in love next Tuesday, I'm going to begin my novel.' The novel has to come to you. It has to feel just like love.

When you start reading nonfiction books about piracy, you realize that it's actually just a history of desperate people.

Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It's the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.

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.

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.

Discovery still happens in the writing.

You start in nonfiction with a whole lot more going for you, because all the discovery isn't waiting to be made. You've made some of it in the research. As you get deeper into a piece and do more research, the notes are in the direction of the piece - you're actually writing it.

I didn’t like it [computer] when I first began using it.

Where it’s helped me a lot is in nonfiction which is a kind of different process. You’ve got research, you’ve got your notes, You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape

Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.

I like nonfiction books about people with wretched lives.

Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths. As for nonfiction, for history, it may be real, but its truth is slippery, hard to access, with no fixed meaning bolted to it. If history doesn't become story, it dies to everyone except the historian.

Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths.

Let me roughly divide books into those which compete with the movies and those with which the movies cannot compete. They are the books that can elevate or instruct. If they are fine works of fiction, they can deepen your appreciation of human life. If they are serious works of nonfiction, they can inform or enlighten you.

With fiction, and also with nonfiction that you can take your time doing, you have a much better chance of reaching across the divide and connecting with somebody who is opposed to you on some things. They're opposed to you on one axis, which is politics, but if you go over the axis called puppies, you might find some common ground.

My theory for nonfiction is that nobody can be free of some kind of conceptions about whatever story they're writing. But if you can find a way to build those into the story, then the story becomes a process of deconstructing and heightening and sometimes changing those notions and that makes dramatic tension. The initial statement of your position, and then letting reality act on you to change it, is pretty good storytelling.

With nonfiction, I go in trying to be really honest about what my preconceptions are.

Nonfiction is never going to die.

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