Stewart O'Nan Quotes

Nonfiction is more personal for me. It's more personal in that it's more direct, and actually it's always been more direct, even when I first started doing pieces.

Everything is autobiography, even if one writes something that is totally objective. The fact that it's a subject that seizes you makes it autobiographical.

Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That's material that I really like.

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.

There's nothing quite as exciting or moving as the very finest literary non-fiction.

Autobiographies, for the most part, to me, are like writing a love letter to yourself.

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

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.

Autobiographical fiction is very tricky.

It's true of so many fiction writers that I much prefer the essayistic work they did, whether it's David Foster Wallace's, or John Cheever's, or Nathaniel Hawthorne's.

That accurst autobiographic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap, and the easy.

When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things.

Every writer is going to end up drawing from their own experiences in one way or another.

I never really considered writing something that was nonfiction.

I can only write about personal stuff, about my point of view.

Anything I write is going to be autobiographical and true to some degree.

I am not a pure fiction writer, nor am I an academic writer. Somehow I ended up in this blended area of literary journalism.

The easiest thing to write was 'Fever Pitch' because it was a memoir.

In many ways, I've been writing personal stories all my life.

We've always written from personal experiences.

I write and teach creative nonfiction. I was a reporter.

I'm such a first-person writer.

'Dreams from My Father' was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction.

I write about personal experiences.

If I had to compare myself to another artist, I wouldn't. I feel like my lyrics are really strong. I'm good at painting pictures and telling picture stories.