Nonfiction Quotes
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Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That's material that I really like.
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My work was entirely nonfiction.
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There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.
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It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.
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People respect nonfiction but they read novels.
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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.
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Creative non-fiction is such a liberating genre because it allows the non-fiction writer, whether he or she be journalist or essayist, to use all of the techniques of the fiction writer and all of the ideas, creative approaches, that fiction writers get a chance to use, but they have to use it in a true story.
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It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.
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I tend to read non-fiction.
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I love to read nonfiction and memoir, but I'm mostly interested in the piece of writing more than the person.
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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.
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I remember reading an interview with a writer who said that in nonfiction if you have one lie it sort of messes it up. But in fiction the real details give you so much more credibility, because people do so much research just to write fiction. In fiction you're trying to recreate something lifelike.
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After the Dance was my first attempt at nonfiction. I'd never really participated in carnival, and I really wanted to go. It sounded like a wonderfully fun thing to do. And I wanted to write something happy about Haiti, something celebratory. And going to carnival gave me a chance to do that, because it is one of the instances in Haiti when people shed their class separation and come together.
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After writing fiction for so long, I like the discovery element of nonfiction, in the sense that when you find the right information, it feels like gold.
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I often read nonfiction, and some of my ideas begin there.
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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.
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I consider myself a writer, foremost - a nonfiction writer.
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In early drafts, one of the trickiest things for me to do was to realize that the techniques and devices that make readable and compelling nonfiction are not always identical to the ones that make good fiction.
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A fictional character living in a nonfiction world.
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One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
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I first moved to New York, like many twenty-somethings before me, to be a grown up. I was attending an MFA program in the city, starting work at a nonfiction imprint at a reputable publishing house, and excited about being on track to becoming the writer I had always wanted to be.
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I started writing nonfiction because nonfiction is well-suited to subjects that, if you wrote them as fiction, people would say, "I don't believe this. This is a little outlandish".
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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.
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We like nonfiction, and we live in fictitious times.
