Nonfiction Quotes

I like to get paid for doing basic research, so it's pleasant to write some nonfiction about it.

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.

In nonfiction, you have that limitation, that constraint, of telling the truth.

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

I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.

Nonfiction is never going to die.

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.

I don't think the potential for comics in nonfiction has been exploited nearly as much as it could be.

Ah, well, I have no talent for nonfiction, that's my problem.

I've written many nonfiction books, but that's a special gift.

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.'

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.

People respect nonfiction but they read novels.

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.