Quotes & Sayings About Nonfiction
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Top Nonfiction Quotes
In order to understand more it is imperative that we improve our knowledge before choosing which side of the fence we feel compelled to belong, — J.P. Robinson
Inspiring leadership communication is not about great oratory or great charisma; rather it is about getting others to believe in themselves and believe in your cause, and then achieve more than they thought was possible. — Kevin Murray
Good, capable individuals unconsciously and consciously guard and nurture themselves and their spirits every day in all sorts of choices, large and small. Just as their lives are never static, they are rarely if ever fractured. Their morals and ethics are never cut off from the whole of their evolving beings. — Donald Van De Mark
I just like to say I'm from London, I don't have any specific area I represent. I'm not representing for a small group of people. I'd like everybody to be able to relate to a nerd, because everybody's a bit nerdy. I'm more interested in that than in where they're from. I'm more interested in what people do. — Craig Taylor
Gunner shook his head; he wasn't in the mood. He stared down at his bottle as he spoke. "Yeah, and what if I do go after it and what if I find no one, and I'm alone for the next sixty years? What then? Huh? Friends and family will get married. I'll be stuck buying gifts. Years pass: children, birthday parties. At dinner parties, I'll be odd man out, forcing people to arrange five chairs around a table instead of four or six. Or, okay, let's say maybe twenty years down the line I meet someone nice and I've already given up on ever finding true love. Let's say the girl is a few pounds overweight, has fizzy hair and an annoying laugh, but at this point, I'm also a few pounds overweight and my hair is thinning and my laughter is annoying. Maybe then the two of us get married, and both our groups of friends will say, 'See I told you that you'd find true love. It just took a while.' And we'll smile, but we'll both know it's a lie-- — Michael Anthony
Money has the power to get, all that you want.
Money has the power to make you forget, all that you want. — Akash Lakhotia
I like to read, especially nonfiction. I love learning, so I study languages, cook, learn basic HTML, and enjoy other activities that stimulate communication and the dark recesses of my musician's brain. — Joshua Roman
Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading. — George Macaulay Trevelyan
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. — Yann Martel
Nonfiction-wha t the hell, that just says, this is nongrapefruit we're having this morning. — John McPhee
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
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
For outdoors, he wears a mantle fastened at the shoulder with a clasp or chain; although buttons are sometimes used for decoration, the buttonhole has not been invented. — Joseph Gies
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. — Dan Brown
Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That's material that I really like. — Rick Moody
I read almost exclusively nonfiction when I read, because even though it's harder to find a great true story, when you find one, the idea that it actually happened is immensely powerful.That's what moves me the most. — Robert Kurson
I discovered that I, a writer of what is known as creative nonfiction, could do the research and bridge the gap in my books and lectures through true storytelling. This is not 'dumbing down' or writing for eighth graders. It is writing for readers across cultures, age barriers, social and political landscapes. — Lee Gutkind
I never wanted to be an editor. I never wanted to be a boss. I just wanted to write, and it didn't make any difference whether it was fiction or nonfiction or short stories or whatever. I just - that's what I was destined to do. — Frank Deford
Nonfiction. I didn't choose it as much as it chose me. It squatted and birthed me one raw winter day then jerked me up and set me to scribing. — Chila Woychik
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
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
Instrumental keys [on organs], introduced in the twelfth century, are so heavy and stiff that they must be played with clenched fists. — Joseph Gies
I don't think the potential for comics in nonfiction has been exploited nearly as much as it could be. — Scott McCloud
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
Poetry is a way of coming to know the realness of things; fiction is a way of coming to know the world of relationships; nonfiction is a way of coming to know the world of the mind. — Kelly Cherry
You have to get Real, to get Healed. — Thakore Coco O'Neal
In reference works, as in sin, omission is as bad as willful misbehavior. — Elizabeth McCracken
You can tell a more over-the-top incredible story if you use a nonfiction form. — Chuck Palahniuk
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
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
Prose fills a space, like a liquid poured in from the top, but poetry occupies it, arrays itself in formation, sets up camp and refuses to budge. — Simon Armitage
When I'm working on a novel of my own, I try to read mostly nonfiction, although sometimes I break down and peek at something else. — Carl Hiaasen
The writer's object should be to hold the reader's attention. I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end. This is accomplished only when the narrative moves steadily ahead, not when it comes to a weary standstill, overloaded with every item uncovered in the research. — Barbara W. Tuchman
ROBERT MASELLO is the author of many previous works of fiction and nonfiction, most recently the novels Blood and Ice and The Medusa Amulet. A native of Evanston, Illinois, he studied writing under the novelists Robert Stone and Geoffrey Wolff at Princeton, and has since taught and lectured at many leading universities. For six years, he was the visiting lecturer in literature at Claremont McKenna College. He now lives and works in Santa Monica, — Robert Masello
For my books of nonfiction I write about subjects I find fascinating. I've been a Yankees and a Lou Gehrig fan for decades, so I wrote 'Lou Gehrig: The Luckiest Man.' It's more the story of his great courage than of his baseball playing. Children face all sorts of challenges, and it's my hope that some will be inspired by the courage of Lou Gehrig. — David A. Adler
None of the places where I grew up and live in my youth exist any longer: Tsarskoe Selo, Sevastopol, Kiev, Slepnyovo, Gungerburg (Ust-Narova).
The following have survived: Khersones (because it is eternal), Paris - by somebody's oversight, and Petersburg-Leningrad, so that there would be a place to lay my head. — Anna Akhmatova
This is not the case. I find scant evidence in my nonfiction that I have matured at all. I cannot find a single idea I hadn't swiped from somebody else and enunciated plonkingly by the time I reached the seventh grade. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
People seem to read so much more nonfiction than fiction, and so it always gives me great pleasure to introduce a friend or family member to a novel I believe they'll cherish but might not otherwise have thought to pick up and read. — Chris Bohjalian
Writers of nonfiction have the right - perhaps even the responsibility - to access the wonders of the writer's craft to make their work interesting and enjoyable. — Sol Stein
It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn. — Annie Dillard
Thanks to the nation's testing mania (which I like to call 'No Child Left Untested' rather than 'No Child Left Behind'), children are being barraged with a nonstop volley of standardized tests. From kindergarten to graduate school, students are subjected to an unprecedented number of high-stakes tests — Laurie E. Rozakis
Fiction is more dangerous than nonfiction because it can seduce better. I think we all know this, know that deeper truths can be approached in fiction than in fact. There are risks for the reader, because after reading certain books you find you have changed irreversibly. There are risks for writers: in China, now, and Ethiopia and other countries right now, writers face real persecution. — Chris Abani
The difference between nonfiction and fiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable. — Mark Twain
People and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built. Every human event happens somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that somewhere was like. — William Zinsser
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
The melancholy comes over me, the dismal misery of not knowing where I am, or perhaps losing any sense of who I am, as if the mist is bringing about an evaporation of identity, all the certainties of the self leaching away into the cloud. — Simon Armitage
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
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
While I was in school, trying to figure out how to write an essay that could both satisfy my nonfiction workshops and still pass as something hybrid-y enough for my poetry workshops, I was looking for models, for forebears. — John D'Agata
Similarly, when we denigrate our bodies - whether through neglect or staring at our faces and counting up our flaws - we are belittling a sacred site, a worship space more wonderous than the most glorious, ancient cathedral. We are standing before the Grand Canyon or the Sistine Chapel and rolling our eyes. — Tish Harrison Warren
Ironically, in today's marketplace successful nonfiction has to be unbelievable, while successful fiction must be believable. — Jerry B. Jenkins
I've written many nonfiction books, but that's a special gift. — Tim LaHaye
A nonfiction author has to bring a platform with him - radio, a TV show or some kind of recognizable vehicle to help launch them. And the agent is really necessary to represent all of the business interests of the author. — Larry Kirshbaum
Protein, so far as we know, does not replicate itself all by itself, not on this planet anyway. Looked at this way, the [prion] seems the strangest thing in all biology, and, until someone in some laboratory figures out what it is, a candidate for Modern Wonder. (quote originally by Lewis Thomas) — D.T. Max
A raped girl is bad for the family: it shows that they can't protect their women; that they have little social standing; and that they're not respectable. It's worse for the victim because once a woman, or a girl - or a boy - is known as the target of a rape she becomes so despised, so shamed, so worthless that she turns into public property. No one is raped only once. — Louise Brown
The single thought that can empower us to empower the world: Mankind's use of fossil fuels is supremely virtuous-because the human life is the standard of value, and because using fossil fuels transforms our environment to make it wonderful for human life. — Alex Epstein
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
Reading literary fiction stimulates cognition beyond the brain functions related to reading, say, magazine articles, interviews, or most online nonfiction reporting. — Susan Reynolds
Nobody knows this crime territory better than Mark Langan. His authentic experience proves that he is an expert in telling a story worth listening to. --Alex Kava, NY Times Bestselling Crime Novelist — Mark Langan
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
The truth is that every writer, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, is trying to write something truly original and that's what I think I'm doing. — Lisa Scottoline
All works of nonfiction, or memoir, have to first and foremost be art before they can be true. They have to be artful first before they can be truthful... If you emphasize the truth-telling at the expense of art, nobody is going to be interested in it. And if you sacrifice truth in the name of art, you risk triviality. There's a constant balance between those two. — Alan Shapiro
The Annual Register for 1763 tabulated the casualty list for British sailors in the Seven Years' War with France. Out of 184,899 men raised or rounded up for the war, 133, 708 died from disease, primarily scurvy, while only 1,512 were killed in action. — Stephen R. Brown
I have written two nonfiction books, I'm embarrassed to say. — Dirk Benedict
When you write fiction, you can sort of invent more but also pack it with emotions that are very pertinent to you. Whereas with nonfiction, you have to be as factual as possible but also hopefully - also bring ... emotional relevance to the piece. — Oscar Hijuelos
Your supporters can help you think in new ways, solve problems, and burst through barriers. — Beverly K. Bachel
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
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
We believe that nonfiction should contain only information that's true. Journalists and nonfiction author can't know what a person thinks or feels or believes---they only know what the person says and writes and does. If an author tells you someone's inner thoughts, move that book to the fiction shelf. — Bill Dedman
I read the same amount of nonfiction and fiction. — Anne Lamott
I never look at a painting and ask, "Is this painting fictional or non-fictional?" It's just a painting. — Scott McClanahan
I realized I couldn't have one foot in the fiction world and one foot in the nonfiction world, which is why 'Here I Go Again' is so not me. I didn't graduate from high school in the '90s, I never listened to metal music, and I don't time travel. — Jen Lancaster
I always think about the past, it's so large and bright. — Anna Akhmatova
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
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
I write narrative nonfiction, creating lively scenes through action and the use of quotes from firsthand accounts, all based on rigorous research. If I say a character leaned against a fence on a windy day, than I have at least two sources to back up these details. — Jim Murphy
It is not the business of a Queen to be human. — Antal Szerb
It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously. — Erica Jong
At least for me, it takes more knowledge to write fiction than nonfiction. At least about someplace that I begin with a lot of ignorance about. — William T. Vollmann
Wives of criminals, Massau later reflected, were indeed an interesting lot. There are those who, real panthers in madness, defend their men with claws out; there are the cold and insensitive ones, who wrestling step by step, discuss each argument and answer your questions with other questions; there are the stubborn ones who can pass the entire night in total silence against the light of the interrogation; there are still others, who, shaken and in distress, discover as you do that they have lived for years beside a monster. — David King
I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority. — Peter Matthiessen
Poverty Effeciency Syndrome are multiple negative poverty effects (Self induced effects,acquired,inherited..) — Ikechukwu Joseph
I receive grace. And through me, grace could flow on. Like a cycle of water in continuous movement, grace is meant to fall, a rain ... again, again, again. I could share the grace, multiply the joy, extend the table of the feast, enlarge the paradise of His presence. I am blessed. I can bless. — Ann Voskamp
There is a difference between fiction and nonfiction deeper than technique or intention. I value both but genuinely believe that fiction can tell a larger truth. — Dorothy L. Sayers
I often read nonfiction, and some of my ideas begin there. — Will Hobbs
Most of the time our inner voice tries to guide us to 'Truth' but we, out of our own vested interests, wish to continue living in our own self-created illusions because it suits our purpose or fulfils our needs. — Kapil Kumar Bhaskar
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
Do Everything You Love — Sarvesh Jain
Nonfiction is never going to die. — Tom Wolfe
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'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
Steel identifies what he calls two faulty believes: first, that life should be easy, and second, that our self-worth is dependent on our success. — Daniel J. Levitin
Because the kind of nonfiction I write has a plot, the events and transactions that make up a life, nonfiction offers me a break from plotting. — Kathryn Harrison
Make mistakes, a thousand of them because we are only humans.
Never repeat your mistakes because we are humans. — Akash Lakhotia
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
Attitude plays a bigger role than you may imagine in determining your future success - bigger than talent, money, or popularity. — Beverly K. Bachel
The most meaningful hopes and dreams don't come from outside sources - they come from within. — Beverly K. Bachel