Writing Nonfiction Quotes

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

Interviewer: Have you ever considered writing nonfiction? Mary Doria Russell: Oh, honey, I did! Let's see ... There was "A Reconsideration of the Evidence for Cannibalism at the Krapina Neandertal Site." That was a big hit. And who could ever forget "Cutmarks on the Engis II Calvarium"? Then there was "Browridge Development as a Function of Bending Stress in the Supraorbital Region." I got tons of reprint requests for that one. Trust me fiction is better. ~ Mary Doria Russell

Writing - the act of one person giving a piece of their soul to another. ~ J. Spredemann

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

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

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

Writing nonfiction means I tell people's stories for them, not because they're special but because we all are. ~ Jo Deurbrouck

I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction. ~ Irvine Welsh

Writing nonfiction has been my most serious education, and for all those years it kept me from even glancing in the direction of despair. ~ Marilynne Robinson

I feel like I'm almost ready to write fiction about the border. But even after 10 years of writing nonfiction about it, I don't think I know quite enough to do it right. ~ William T. Vollmann

We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Who does not know history's first law to be that an author must not dare to tell anything but the truth? And its second that he must make bold to tell the whole truth? That there must be no suggestion of partiality anywhere in his writings? Nor of malice? ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

It was easy enough to tell: if I wasn't writing, I didn't exist. ~ Therese Anne Fowler

A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it. ~ Samuel Johnson

Whereas if you were writing an op-ed piece or an essay, somebody would be asking, "What's your point?" With poetry you can stay in a moment for as long as you want. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. It's the thing that opens out to something else. What that something else is changes for readers. So what's on the page - it falls away. ~ Claudia Rankine

I have written more than 100 novels and novellas since 1983 - I was first published in 1985. There was an overlap of three years with my teaching career, but finally I felt good enough about my writing career to quit teaching and write full time. ~ Mary Balogh

Mad Hatter: "Why is a raven like a writing-desk?"
"Have you guessed the riddle yet?" the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.
"No, I give it up," Alice replied: "What's the answer?"
"I haven't the slightest idea," said the Hatter ~ Lewis Carroll

Writing should not be routine; writing should actually be the opposite of procedural because otherwise the written word would become a routine word. ~ Elie Wiesel

Writing about a war will always be political writing, no matter what amount of hermetical hide-and-seek or aesthetical operations are involved. ~ Sasa Stanisic

It can be hard to write a skillfully entertaining fiction, but a great book wants to be more, and wants more from us. ~ Guy Gavriel Kay

To make the writing process easier for you, do more research. The more information you have about the topic you chose to write about, the more effective, easier and practical writing experience you will have, and the better reading material readers will get. ~ Noora Ahmed Alsuwaidi

Writing is an animal that lives in the soul. It must not be whipped into doing tricks. It is not a circus animal. It can be fierce, but it is not malevolent. It can be playful, but it is not without wisdom. Above all, it is wild. A wild animal has to sleep sometimes. This is a time of deep sleep for my writing. ~ Pat Schneider

When a man hangs from a tree it doesn't spell justice unless he helped write the law that hanged him. ~ E.B. White

I do not attach
any exaggerated importance to my poetical works. Life is
there to be lived rather than to be written about. My aim
is to search out the manifold experience that it offers,
wringing from each moment what of emotion it presents.
I look upon my writing as a graceful accomplishment
which does not absorb but rather adds pleasure to
existence. And as for posterity - damn posterity. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

You can find truly original pieces of writing, but they're original because you go, "Who would have even have thought of that?," or, "Why would anyone ever want to go see that?" ~ Doug Liman

You do it a day at a time. You just put your rejection slips in a shoebox and tell yourself one day you're going to autograph them and sell them at auction. ~ James Lee Burke

Not to say people shouldn't get rich from art. I adore the alchemy wherein artists who cast a complex spell make rich people give them their money. (Just writing it makes me cackle.) But too many artists have been making money without magic. ~ Jerry Saltz

A mind can be overthrown by words; that's the point. What is happening to the brain of a person who uses the passive, who writes, 'Delay should not be allowed to take place' instead of 'Hurry'? The user of the passive verb doesn't want a universe in which responsible agents do their acts. You see? Bad language ultimately is IMMORAL. ~ Richard Mitchell

The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be the same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one:
ETC. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The agent never receipts his bill, puts his hat on and bows himself out. He stays around forever, not only for as long as you can write anything that anyone will buy, but as long as anyone will buy any portion of any right to anything that you ever did write. He just takes ten per cent of your life. ~ Raymond Chandler

The dirty little secret about adventure writing is that something has to go wrong. ~ Tim Cahill

Do not, therefore, say "I feel nauseous," unless you are sure you have that effect on others. ~ William Strunk Jr.

Everything a man writes about himself is instructive. ~ John Glassco

I do so much writing. But so much of it never goes anywhere, never sees any light of day. I suppose that's like gardening in the basement. I don't publish so much of what I write. I just seem to plow it back into the soil of what I write after it, rewriting and rewriting, thinking that somehow it gets better after the fifty-second-time around. I need to learn to abandon my writing. To let go of it. Dispose of it, like tissue. ~ J.R. Tompkins

As you no doubt gathered, I do not devote the care to word selection and organization in my letters that I do in my books Generally, I don't write letters at all ... Writing, for me, is work, and I do not like to do my work carelessly, but if I waited until I got a letter into the shape I'd be happy with, you would never hear another word from me and would think I had perished on a mountain ... ~ Janet Malcolm

Suppose a would-be writer can't begin? I really believe there are many excellent writers who have never written because they never could begin. This is especially the case of people of great sensitiveness, or of people of advanced education. Professors suffer most of all from this inhibition. Many of them carry their unwritten books to the grave. They overestimate the magnitude of the task, they overestimate the greatness of the final result. A child in a prep school will write the History of Greece and fetch it home finished after school. "He wrote a fine History of Greece the other day," says his fond father. Thirty years later the child, grown to be a professor, dreams of writing the History of Greece
the whole of it from the first Ionic invasion of the Aegean to the downfall of Alexandria. But he dreams. He never starts. He can't. It's too big. Anybody who has lived around a college knows the pathos of those unwritten books. ~ Stephen Leacock

I would want to travel the world and write about it. To be a famous writer. ~ Shantel VanSanten

I'd got married and wanted to have kids, so had kids, brought them up, did other things, and slowly got back into music. And it feels great, having one foot in the present, writing and covering interesting songs, and having one foot in the past. ~ Kim Wilde

I've translated two of Bae's novels, A Greater Music and Recitation, which are coming from Open Letter and Deep Vellum in October and January respectively. A Greater Music is a semi-autobiographical book centred on a Korean writer moving to Berlin, learning to live and even write in a foreign language. ~ Deborah Smith

It's not just about acting. I love film, I'm a director now, I love writing, I love producing, I love having a company that makes films and to be prolific and have a place to put all the ideas that are constantly bubbling up inside of me and that don't let me sleep at night. ~ Drew Barrymore

If you are writing about baloney, don't try and make it Cornish hen, because that's the worst kind of baloney there is. Just make it darn good baloney. ~ Leo Burnett

One of my proudest achievements is that when an authoritative book about Hungarian literature came out about a decade ago, there was a little article about me which said I was a Hungarian writer but pretending not to be. Bearing in mind I can hardly write a cheque in Hungarian, I was delighted to be included in the pantheon of Hungarian writers. ~ Tibor Fischer

Unfortunately, poetry is not born in noise, in crowds, or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That's what writing is all about. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

I am writing this because on that night of the tenth of May in the 1,940th year of Our Lord, Churchill stood for more than England. Millions of people, especially across Europe, recognized him now as the champion of their hopes. (In faraway Bengal India there was at least one man, that admirably independent writer and thinker, Nirad Chaudhuri, who fastened Churchill's picture on the wall of his room the next day.) Churchill was _the_ opponent of Hitler, the incarnation of the reaction to Hitler, the incarnation of the resistance of an old world, of old freedoms, of old standards against a man incarnating a force that was frighteningly efficient, brutal, and new. ~ John Lukacs

I never pretend to be so superior a being as to be above having and indulging a hobby horse [her journal writing], and while I keep mine within due bounds and limits, nobody, I flatter myself, would wish to deprive me of the poor animal: to be sure, he is not formed for labour, and is rather lame and weak, but then the dear creature is faithful, constant, and loving, and though he sometimes prances, would not kick anyone into the mire, or hurt a single soul for the world
and I would not part with him for one who could win the greatest prize that ever was won at any races. ~ Fanny Burney