Nonfiction Quotes

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

I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority. ~ Peter Matthiessen

Nonfiction is never going to die. ~ Tom Wolfe

God can enter into me, even me, and use these hands, these feet, to be His love, a love that goes on and on and on forever, endless cycle of grace. ~ Ann Voskamp

I read a little bit of nonfiction and a lot of poetry. I think of poetry as my shot of whiskey when I don't have time to savor a whole bottle of wine. ~ Alice McDermott

The Igbo nation in precolonial times was not quite like any nation most people are familiar with. It did not have the apparatus of centralized government but a conglomeration of hundreds of independent towns and villages each of which shared the running of its affairs among its menfolk according to title, age, occupation, etc.; and its women folk who had domestic responsibilities as well as the management of the scores of four-day and eight-day markets that bound the entire region and its neighbours in a network of daily exchange of goods and news, from far and near. ~ Chinua Achebe

I'm sure the holy refrigerator is packed solid with cartons of Blue Bell ice cream - times a million. All those amazing flavor combinations minus the calories and fat grams, of course. After all, we are talking about heaven here, amen? ~ Diane Moody

considering that lexicons and dictionaries are practically a high art form in German- speaking countries. The entry merges Essad Bey and Wolfgang von Weisl into one person. It explains that "Wolfgang (von) Weisl" also used the pseudonyms Leo Noussimbaum, Essad Bey, and Kurban Said - and hence the Austrian journalist, who otherwise had only a travel book and a book on Austrian artillery to his credit, suddenly was the prolific author of approximately twenty works of fiction and nonfiction ~ Tom Reiss

The act of writing should not be accompanied by the sense of an audience, someone peering over your shoulder, but in nonfiction I think it's almost imperative that you identify an audience so you can confirm or challenge or undermine whatever ideas or prejudices they might have about your subject. ~ Pankaj Mishra

instead of mourning, instead of a moment of silence or a hateful, islamophobic message, how about today we make the world a little brighter?
be kinder. be a little gentler, with yourself and others. take more pictures. tell more jokes. be a better human.
today is a lot more than a tragedy. today is a birthday. a day of suicide awareness. a wedding. a birth. a new job. today is a kiss and someone on a tarred over warehouse roof whispering about the day the earth stood still and the day it began spinning again.
be kind. just be kind. it's time we took this day back for the wild ones, for the fiery eyes, for the happy and the brave and the new. no more mourning. let it just be a sunday. ~ Taylor Rhodes

If you can find time for [other] activities, you can make time for your goals. ~ Beverly K. Bachel

Heaven's no place for one who thrives on hell. ~ Carrie Fisher

We met when we were only 16, at a high school dance. When he died, we were 50. I remember how I didn't want that day to end, terrible as it was. I didn't want to go to sleep because as long as I was awake, it was still a day that I shared with Sean. ~Beverly Eckert ~ Garrett M. Graff

I read more than I had in years-novels, short stories, three long nonfiction books about how we had stumbled into the Iraq mess (the short answer appeared to have W for a middle initial and a dick for a Vice President). ~ Stephen King

When people ask what kind of nonfiction I write, I say 'all kinds,' but really I mean I don't write any kind at all: I'm trying to dissolve the borders between memoir and journalism and criticism by weaving them together. ~ Leslie Jamison

I often read nonfiction with a pencil in hand. I love the feel, the smell, the design, the weight of a book, but I also enjoy the convenience of my Kindle - for travel and for procuring a book in seconds. ~ Drew Gilpin Faust

In certain fiction, she perceives truths that she rarely finds in nonfiction; therefore, in her quest to better understand the world and the meaning of her life, she reads those novels that suggest a world of wonders, dark and light, forever unfolding for eyes willing to see. ~ Dean Koontz

I come from a family of writers. My mom had been a writer, nonfiction books, and her mother was a playwright in the 1930s and '40s. And my twin brother, Alexi, is a writer on 'The Following.' ~ Noah Hawley

Gratitude is the root of all transformation and abundance. ~ Carol Starr Taylor

I'm not a poet, but I was in the poetry program. And I'm also not much of a nonfiction writer, at least not in the standard sense of nonfiction, nor especially in the way we were thinking about nonfiction back then, in the late 90s. ~ John D'Agata

For a woman to deny the necessity of true love in her life would be to deny herself, and her creator. ~ Dwain K. White Sr.

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

Life! What Inscrutable Card Shall Ye Throw Next Upon the Soft Felt of Our Days? ~ Colson Whitehead

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

I've been a lifelong horror fan, but at the same time, I would say 90 percent of my reading is biographies and nonfiction history. ~ Seth Grahame-Smith

I have three libraries. As a gift, a friend alphabetized and organized my main library of novels, history books, and nonfiction. Then I have a photo-book collection. Then there's this nearly whole room of my childhood books. I've also got cookbooks and a big collection of horse-related books. ~ Sally Mann

Another of them died last night. His body was in the bazaar this morning. It lay, with a collecting bowl at its feet, on the charpoy that is reserved for those who die without money or family to bury them. He looked desiccated and his skin had the sheen and color of the dates we eat to break our fast. There are new bodies on that charpoy every week. ~ Louise Brown

Arriving rarely makes you as happy as you anticipate.
p 84 ~ Gretchen Rubin

Nonfiction-wha t the hell, that just says, this is nongrapefruit we're having this morning. ~ John McPhee

highway wildflowers swaying like the ocean. queen anne's lace like doilies for a tea party never attended. this is a conversation between two parts of yourself. the fever will break soon, but until then i'll be untangling you from the knots in my windblown hair. i smell like a wet forest, like long grass covered in sequins. i called your name but was drowned out by the thunder. i remember you murmuring, "please," while you took my shirt off. i remember you and the airy "please" when you pulled me toward you by my legs. i remember "pleeease" while i learned how to let go. i remember your divine "please." chanting it as if it'd draw a demon out of hiding. "please, please, please." and i screamed, "yes. ~ Taylor Rhodes

I read little nonfiction, but I have no boundaries about the fiction I relish. The only unfailing criterion is that I can hitch my heart to the imagined world and read on. ~ Scott Turow

I considered not getting up, but recognized the pain of staying down was worse than the pain of attempting to stand. ~ Reba Riley

no one can recover if they won't admit the wrongdoings.
i won't recover if i pretend it was all sunshine.
i have to remember his vindictive temper and realize that sheltering the house from the storm wasn't actually going to make a difference if i still got damaged in the process. because then it's just another broken house with no one to tell its story. ~ Taylor Rhodes

In December 2011, I will be opening up my production house, Sharmeen Obaid Films, and aspire to change the way Pakistanis approach nonfiction storytelling. There are thousands of stories to be found here. ~ Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

It is not the business of a Queen to be human. ~ Antal Szerb

Writing a nonfiction book should primarily be about establishing credibility and authority in a specific domain. ~ Hassan Osman

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. ~ Norman Mailer

Curiously, anatomical reality in art was apparently a horrifying concept to the same men and women who lined up to see bodies at the morgue. ~ Deborah Davis

If there was one thing I had learned. . . it was that politics was a damn dirty business. ~ Clint Hill

I took out my grenade and put my fingers inside the pin. 'Do you boys want this to be your last meal, or do you want to answer his question? ~ Ishmael Beah

What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully. ~ V.S. Naipaul

Change for someone today and tomorrow you will hear them say, "You are not the same. ~ Akash Lakhotia

What is necessary, he explains, is an understanding that the youth are not the Other. It is being able to see your humanity reflected in them. ~ John Hubner

Fiction is entertaining. Nonfiction is epic. ~ A.D. Posey

A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered 'nonfiction.' ~ Joyce Carol Oates

I think all of the best nonfiction that has ever been made comes from the result of someone who can't stop thinking about a certain topic - a very specific aspect of a certain topic in some cases. And second, they got really good at figuring out what they had to say about it. ~ Merlin Mann

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

Public 'career feminists' have been more concerned with getting more women into 'boardrooms', when the problem is that there are altogether too many boardrooms, and none of them are on fire. ~ Laurie Penny

In myth, women's boundaries are pliant, porous, mutable. Her power to control them is inadequate, her concern for them unreliable. Deformation attends her. She swells, she shrinks, she leaks, she is penetrated, she suffers metamorphoses. The women of mythology regularly lose their form in monstrosity. ~ Anne Carson

...beggars were permitted to enter great houses and solicit directly from the table, but now they are restricted to the doorstep. ~ Joseph Gies

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. ~ Kathleen Rooney

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. ~ Jon Scieszka

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. ~ Dinaw Mengestu

For a brief review of our history to date shows us in a very singular role:that of serial killers. ~ Mark Lynas

(And also like Satan, I'm a beautiful loser.) ~ Benjamin Hale

Whatever you believe, and however, each of us deals with these events in our lives, one thing is for certain the truism, time is a great healer, is of no consolation at that moment of intense, all-consuming grief.

From GLASS HALF FULL ~ Sarah Jane Butfield

Nonfiction writers are the packhorses of literature. We're meant to carry the story. If we can make it up and down the mountain by a reliable if not scenic route, we have delivered. Technique is optional. ~ Stacy Schiff

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

People who read literary fiction (as opposed to popular fiction or nonfiction) were better able to detect another person's emotions, and the theory proposed was that literary fiction engages the reader in a process of decoding the characters' thoughts and motives in a way that popular fiction and nonfiction, being less complex, do not. ~ Daniel J. Levitin

In reference works, as in sin, omission is as bad as willful misbehavior. ~ Elizabeth McCracken

Maybe love is something we're meant to say casually and not regard as a prize from a treasure chest that a person earns. ~ Jen Glantz

Here, we are saying that we will tear your country apart, we will give birth to the terror within, and then we will leave you to drown in it. ~ Hanif Abdurraqib

I know a lot of people were praying for us to find the arsenic. ~ Jeannie Walker

Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading. ~ George Macaulay Trevelyan

My stories may seem to be the stories of men, but a check of my books will show that I have probably written the stories of more strong women than any other writer ... [examples include] Miss Nesselrode of The Lonesome Gods, Ruth Macken of Bendigo Shafter, Echo Sackett of Ride the River, Em Talon of Ride the Dark Trail are some ... [and] one of my favorites is Miss Jessica Trescott of Matagorda. (The Sackett Companion) ~ Louis L'Amour

I suspect few housing projects in the US were designed by architects who expected to live in them. You see the same thing in programming languages. C, Lisp, and Smalltalk were created for their own designers to use. Cobol, Ada, and Javawere created for other people to use. If you think you're designing
something for idiots, odds are you're not designing something good, even for idiots. ~ Paul Graham

Back in the day, a lot of our instructors in nonfiction were actually fiction scholars. So they would bring in stories as models for the essay. And in some ways that's a good idea, because we can all learn from other genres. But I think it also made me realize that I literally didn't have an essay model, and that if I wanted one I would have to find it. ~ John D'Agata

Natures and features last until the grave ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Though I consider The Chronology of Water to be an anti-memoir for very precise reasons, it is an art form, and thus as open to "critique" as any other art form. Memoir has a form, formal strategies, issues of composition and craft, style, structure, all the elements of fiction or nonfiction or painting or music or what have you. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

El Shaddai. My all-sufficient God who is able to handle all my needs. Everything I will ever need I can find in Him. Think about that for a moment. Do you sense the power He offers us in those words? There is nothing, absolutely nothing in your life that He cannot handle. ~ Diane Moody

It's a powerful experience, shitting. There's something magical about it, profound even. I think God made humans shit in the way we do because it brings us back down to earth and gives us humility. I don't care who you are, we all shit the same. Beyoncé shits. The pope shits. The Queen of England shits. When we shit we forget our airs and our graces, we forget how famous or how rich we are. All of that goes away. ~ Trevor Noah

Since I was a kid. I had this series by Ballantine Books about the history of World Wars I and II. In my 20s, it was the Vietnam War literature of novelists like Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, and Tobias Wolff, and then nonfiction such as "A Bright Shining Lie" by Neil Sheehan and "The Best and Brightest" by David Halberstam . Those are the two best histories of Vietnam. ~ George Packer

Eucharisteo means 'to give thanks,' and give is a verb, something that we do. God calls me to do thanks. to give the thanks away. That thanks-giving might literally become thanks-living. That our lives become the very blessings we have received. I am blessed. I can bless. Imagine! I could let Him make me the gift! I could be the joy! ~ Ann Voskamp

Across the bottom of the last page of many a book is written 'Explicit, Deo Gratias ('Finished, thank god')...Books are kept not on open shelves, but in locked chests. ~ Joseph Gies

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. ~ Tom Bissell

When all is said and done, one of our rewards may be praise, but the greater reward is being faithful to follow our Lor and Savior, Jesus Christ. ~ Elizabeth George

I don't believe I can let this subject pass by leaving my own conflicted emotions unconfessed. When Carl Sagan won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1978, I dismissed it as a minor achievement for a scientist, scarcely worth listing. When I won the same prize the following year, it wondrously became a major literary award of which scientists should take special note. ~ Edward O. Wilson

I never look at a painting and ask, "Is this painting fictional or non-fictional?" It's just a painting. ~ Scott McClanahan

A marriage, willy-nilly, requires you to trust that your spouse will tell your story truthfully and lovingly when you are no longer around to tell it yourself. ~ Kate Braestrup

Everyone else thinks I'm a nonfiction writer. I think it's because my nonfiction is easier to find. But I write both in equal measure. I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself, and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing. ~ Roxane Gay

I have been in recent years the author of a bestiary and director of some atlas projects; I've written criticism, editorials, reports from a few front lines, letters, a great many political essays ... , more personal stuff, essays for artists' books, and more ... Nonfiction is the whole realm from investigative journalism to prose poems, from manifestos to love letters, from dictionaries to packing lists. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Pastor Daniel, meanwhile, is sipping water on the balcony of a former sailing clubhouse, I ask if he can show me which parts of the Qur'an cause him concern. He tells me he's not the best person to ask.

'I can introduce you to a guy – I wouldn't call myself a scholarly person on Islam.'

Strange response, considering his travelling roadshow routine. ~ John Safran

He raised his arm to strike me. At that very moment, [my daughter] Meiping's cat, Fluffy, came through the kitchen door, jumped on the man's leg from behind, and sank his teeth into the flesh of the man's calf. ~ Nien Cheng

Culture is like a giant mirror which enables us to see who we are
more clearly. The various facets of a culture also provide us with the means to change what we do not like in the mirror, and retain what we cherish most. ~ Dr Robin Lincoln Wood

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

The story you are about to read is a work of fiction. Nothing - and everything - about it is real. ~ Todd Strasser

I think the goal with any writing, but especially narrative nonfiction, is to put the blockade of putting your thoughts in this unnatural medium of print and then trying to reach through that and actually convey what's going on, what you think, and make people laugh and recognize themselves while doing it. Definitely the laughing thing. ~ Sloane Crosley

If an aristocrat became bankrupt he looked to the sunshine of royal providence [ ... ] but when the nobility sank too low to qualify for royal notice, they became fraudsters, trading on the display of rank: the man would become a card-sharper or gigolo, while the woman sold herself. Actual work would have been unthinkable. It would have offended against the ancient order of things, which assigned that role to the middle classes and the peasantry. This concept is difficult to connect with our modern view of the world, but its very absurdity follows directly from the fact that everything in its old order was so firm and wonderful - with everything in its eternally appointed place and moving in fixed circles like the stars. There was no changing your lot in life at will: it was assigned to you forever, by birth. If you fell below your appointed station, you couldn't just swap it for another - you simply plummeted into the void. ~ Antal Szerb

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

In terms of going back and forth between fiction and nonfiction - in which I'll include memoir, biography, and true crime - is that one relieves the other. ~ Kathryn Harrison

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. ~ Ira Glass

Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you. ~ Tim O'Brien

I find that my reading, particularly nonfiction, can inspire a poem as well as anything else. ~ Billy Collins

- Why should we be feminists? Why not egalitarians?

- "Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general- but to choose to use the vague expression human rights (or egalitarians) is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender.

It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women. That the problem was not about being human, but specifically about being a female human.

For centuries, the world divided human beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress one group. It is only fair that the solution acknowledge that. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Why would I what?" Will asked, wanting another bite of his burger. "Why would you risk your job teaching some stupid fantasy book?" "Because alternative universe literature promotes critical thinking, imagination, empathy, and creative problem solving. Children who are fluent in fiction are more able to interpret nonfiction and are better at understanding things like basic cause and effect, sociology, politics, and the impact of historical events on current events. Many of our technological advances were imagined by science fiction writers before the tech became available to create them, and many of today's inventors were inspired by science fiction and fantasy to make a world more like the world in the story. Many of today's political conundrums were anticipated by science fiction writers like Orwell, Huxley, and Heinlein, and sci-fi and fantasy tackle ethical problems in a way that allows people to analyze the problem with some emotional remove, which is important because the high emotions are often what lead to violence. Works like Harry Potter tackle the idea of abuse of power and - " Will stopped himself and swallowed. Everybody at the table, including Kenny, was staring at him in openmouthed surprise. "Anyway," he said before taking a monster bite of his cooling hamburger on a sudden attack of nerves, "iss goomfer umf." "It's good for us," Kenny translated, sounding a little stunned ~ Amy Lane

You can create viable ventures out of turbulent adventures.-You can creste prosperity out of adversity ~ Ikechukwu Joseph

The smell of cigarette smoke in the air in a tavern that changes names often,
a bar cursed because of a girl who died of a drug overdose
in the basement, we put a few coins in the jukebox;
chose "Angel Band" by Johnny Cash and sat down at the bar,
ordered a soda, you wanted a whiskey on the rocks.
We saw the coal miner who moved here from West Virginia
knocking back liquor like I drink sweet tea.
No one asked why he was so solemn today.
It was warm. It was relatively quiet.
To anyone else, this place could feel sinister.
But to us, it was freedom. It was a hiding place.
No one was ever here long enough to know us.
And we liked it that way. ~ Taylor Rhodes

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. ~ Katherine Boo

Your life is a trajectory. Every choice you make alters that trajectory, in a positive or negative way. Will you categorize that dinner with friends as a business expense? Will you be honest with your daughter? Will you take more credit than you're due? These are just the small questions that we face every day, and little by little, the answers influence the trajectory of our lives and beings. ~ Donald Van De Mark

That part of what I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction didn't obtain, how the correspondence between text and world was less important than the intensities of the poem itself, what possibilities of feeling were opened up in the present tense of reading. ~ Ben Lerner