Fiction has a unique role in conveying Truth. In fact, only fiction that is Truth with a capital T is worthwhile. — Jerry B. Jenkins
The best fiction is far more true than any journalism. — William Faulkner
Don't make a big distinction between fiction and non-fiction. These are arbitrary distinctions. — Farley Mowat
As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography. — Norman Spinrad
It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense. — Mark Twain
Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything. — Ivana Trump
Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive. — Karen Russell
Short Nonfiction Quotes
I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority. — Peter Matthiessen
I'm working on a nonfiction book on Nepal and a novel about diasporas. — Louise Brown
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
Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. — Joan Didion
I have written two nonfiction books, I'm embarrassed to say. — Dirk Benedict
My reading preferences are kind of all over the board - I read nonfiction, I read graphic novels. — Dav Pilkey
For me, a memoir is nonfiction and nonfiction has to be absolutely true. — Akhil Sharma
I enjoy doing the research of nonfiction; that gives me some pleasure, being a detective again. — Joseph Wambaugh
I like nonfiction books about people with wretched lives. — David Sedaris
Reading Nonfiction Quotes
Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction. — Joan D. Vinge
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. — Vladimir Nabokov
When you start reading nonfiction books about piracy, you realize that it's actually just a history of desperate people. — Daniel Handler
What I'm really interested in, as a reader and as a writer, is the idea of the nonfiction book that is not defined by its content, by its "about"-ness. Where you read it irrespective of whether you're interested in the subject. — Geoff Dyer
When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies. — Irvine Welsh
I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction. — Irvine Welsh
I also read a lot of nonfiction. I just got "Nixonland" by Rick Perlstein. I felt like what with everything that is going on with the president [Donald trump] and the parallels with [Richard] Nixon's presidency, I needed to know more about the man. — Laila Lalami
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
Now that I'm taking some time off from school, I've been reading a lot to make sure I don't forget everything. It's mostly classics and nonfiction accounts from actors, directors and writers from the '40s and '50s. — Fred Savage
I read the same amount of nonfiction and fiction. — Anne Lamott
Nonfiction Books Quotes
When I'm writing fiction I'm thinking, God, this is so hard - I have to make all this stuff up! I wish I were writing a nonfiction book where all the facts are laid out and I don't have to be so much at sea. — Douglas Preston
I give this book 5 Stars and highly recommend it to all fiction, nonfiction, and poetry writers, aspiring writers, bloggers or journalists. — Sunny
Every time I write a nonfiction book I get sued. — Joseph Wambaugh
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. — Patti Smith
I've written many nonfiction books, but that's a special gift. — Tim LaHaye
I'd never written nonfiction about the war on drugs, but I know a tremendous amount about it: I taught a class on it for seven years. I was putting into words the stuff I was teaching, and I was writing it up and thought, "Dude, you're writing a book." — Ayelet Waldman
I write funny nonfiction adventure books about crazy, serious worlds. — Jon Ronson
I do think that calling a book nonfiction affirms a kind of responsibility to an attempt at truth. — Garth Greenwell
Politically I also don't believe anymore that we can only have one voice to a story, it's like having one radio station to represent a country. You want the politics of any complicated situation to be complicated in a book of fiction or nonfiction. — Michael Ondaatje
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
Nonfiction Novel Quotes
I've written six novels and four pieces of nonfiction, so I don't really have a genre these days. — Anne Lamott
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
I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature. — Leslie Fiedler
The DNA of the novel - which, if I begin to write nonfiction, I will write about this - is that: the title of the novel is the whole novel. The first line of the novel is the whole novel. The point of view is the whole novel. Every subplot is the whole novel. The verb tense is the whole novel. — Mary Kay Zuravleff
I did not set out to write another novel. One day I sat down with the thought of trying my hand at a piece of nonfiction, a personal memoir of youth, but over the next several weeks, without intending it, the work began evolving into what has become 'Tomcat in Love. — Tim O'Brien
I wrote four novels, but then I realized that the world didn't need me to be a novelist, but the world could use me as a nonfiction writer. — David Quammen
I think I can safely call 2012 average. Overall, it was a stronger year for nonfiction than fiction - a situation that would've surprised me back in January, when I was looking forward to big new novels from several authors I really love. — David Edelstein
The nonfiction novel or literary memoir as authored by women is usually given a much harder time in mainstream criticism. — Kate Zambreno
I'm just too lazy. I wish I could be someone that has wild affairs - all of my favorite nonfiction novels are about these wild affairs and postmarital agonistes - but to be honest, I'm someone that doesn't deal well with instability. — Kate Zambreno
When I was in college I started writing prose, because a very smart professor asked me what I like to read and I said, "Novels," and she said, "You should be writing them then." Memoir never even occurred to me. I think I was afraid of nonfiction and I was afraid of navel-gazing, and of being seen. — Melissa Febos
Fiction And Nonfiction Quotes
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 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. — Arundhati Roy
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
There is always a certain leap of faith that editors have made with their nonfiction writers. If the trust is broken, things can get very embarrassing for the writers and the publisher. — A. Scott Berg
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
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
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. — Stephen King
Maybe I have a one-track mind, but the best writers and thinkers are focusing on nonfiction these days; this is the genre where a writer can make a mark and change an aspect of the world - much more so than in fiction. — Lee Gutkind
Redheaded Peckerwood, which unerringly walks the fine line between fiction and nonfiction, is a disturbingly beautiful narrative about unfathomable violence and its place on the land — Luc Sante
In nonfiction, you have that limitation, that constraint, of telling the truth. — Peter Matthiessen
Writing Nonfiction Quotes
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. — Judith Krantz
One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material. — William Zinsser
I like to get paid for doing basic research, so it's pleasant to write some nonfiction about it. — Bruce Sterling
Good writing is good writing no matter what genre you're writing in, and I believe that there are only a handful of fundamental craft tools that are essential for any genre-including nonfiction. — Georgia Heard
I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994. — Jonathan Franzen
My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me. — Tom Wolfe
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
I write nonfiction in this thriller-esque style. I have all the facts; I research it. I have thousands of pages of court documents... I try to get inside my stories. — Ben Mezrich
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 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. — Frederick Lenz
Creative Nonfiction Quotes
Creative nonfiction writers do not make things up; they make ideas and information that already exist more interesting and often more accessible. — Lee Gutkind
Blogging has helped create an expanded awareness of the creative nonfiction genre, generally. But I suspect many bloggers continue to be unaware that they are (or have the potential to be) "literary" or "artful." — Lee Gutkind
I feel better off doing what I know how to do. I feel a strong element of fictional style in travel writing anyway. Some call it creative nonfiction. — John Gimlette
When you're teaching creative nonfiction, it helps to have written about your life in a very open way, because you can say, 'Look, how much are you willing to risk emotionally to write? How careful can you be with the other people you're writing about? — Marya Hornbacher
Non-fiction Quotes
The idea of copyright did not exist in ancient times, when authors frequently copied other authors at length in works of non-fiction. This practice was useful, and is the only way many authors' works have survived even in part. — Richard Stallman
I did one sci-fi movie. I did 'Gattaca.' I liked 'Gattaca' because that was always the kind of science fiction I really dug, the non-action oriented sci-fi. — Ethan Hawke
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. — Jon Scieszka
There's a fine line between fiction and non-fiction and I think I snorted it somewhere in 1979 — Kinky Friedman
Without books we're a very uneducated society. Think of the places books have taken us, the people we've been introduced to (fiction or non-fiction) and how books have allowed us to broaden our vocabulary. — Tom Robinson
I do, however, feel reasonably strongly the sense that the job of a piece of argumentative scholarly non-fiction is not the same as the job of a piece of fiction. — China Mieville
When you play a non-fiction character it is more responsibility than when you are playing a fiction character because that person lived, and you do want to pay respect to that. — Bryan Cranston
[I like to read] spiritual books, non-fiction, fiction, I have my moods. — MC Lyte
I think fiction can help us find everything. You know, I think that in fiction you can say things and in a way be truer than you can be in real life and truer than you can be in non-fiction. There's an accuracy to fiction that people don't really talk about - an emotional accuracy. — A.M. Homes
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. — Alain de Botton
Non Fiction Quotes
I have two pairs of reading glasses. One pair is for reading fiction, the other for non-fiction. I've read the Bible twice wearing each pair, and it's the same. — Steven Wright
Perhaps this is the purpose of all art, all writing, on the murders, fiction and non-fiction: Simply to participate. — Alan Moore
Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college. — Jennifer Weiner
For some reason, I seem to be bothered whenever I see acts of injustice and assaults on people's civil liberties. I imagine what I write in the future will follow in that vein. Whether it's fiction or non-fiction. — Iris Chang
I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction. — Penelope Lively
I read very widely, both non-fiction and fiction, so I don't think there's a single writer who influences me. — Peter Benchley
I cannot say how strongly I object to people using other people's writing as research. Research is non-fiction, especially for horror, fantasy, science fiction. Do not take your research from other people's fiction. Just don't. — Laurell K. Hamilton
Because I'm such a creative person, and I've always got my nose in a book, I suppose it was only a matter of time before non-fiction turned into fiction again. But I never consciously set out to become a writer and I never thought I'd be doing the things I'm doing today. — Paul Kane
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. — Chester Brown
You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life. — Ethan Canin
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. — Jon Scieszka
I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century. — Tom Wolfe
In this time of the Internet and nonfiction, to be on an actual bookshelf in an actual bookstore is exciting in itself. — Chris Abani
Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously. — Virginia Woolf
People like nonfiction presented to them in a certain way, so that they don't have to think about whether it's true or not. They like it to have that imprimatur of respectability, of genuineness. — Errol Morris
One of the reasons so many nonfiction books are so boring is because what they've done, very diligently, is fulfill the terms of their proposals. They've written up their proposal, long-form, and often what this does is then set up a sort of serial deal, where the whole book can essentially be reduced back to the size of the original proposal! — Geoff Dyer
And there are two types of stories. One type is one's own story. The other type is telling the stories of others. Thanks to this genre, writers of nonfiction can now use the tools of the reporter, the points of view and ear for dialog of a novelist, and the passion and wordplay of the poet. — Lee Gutkind
I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative. — E. L. Doctorow
If you go through any newspaper or magazine and look for active, kicking verbs in the sentences, you will realize that this lack of well used verbs is the main trouble with modern English writing. Almost all nonfiction nowadays is written in a sort of pale, colorless sauce of passives and infinitives, motionless and flat as paper. — Rudolf Flesch
Ah, well, I have no talent for nonfiction, that's my problem. — Jonathan Coe
If you can propose a memoir, even if you are eighteen years old - and what do you remember? What are you memeing? If you can propose a memoir, I believe someone will pay you to write it. And you will get a contract for nonfiction. And if it is about victimology in one way or another than you'll get more money. It's a sensation. — Frederick Busch
In Conclusion
Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of nonfiction quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about nonfiction to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of nonfiction quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.
