John Prine Quotes

I never fantasized or invented a thing, not one thing. I knew every single thing I ever wrote about.

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.

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.

I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.

Autobiography should be more stringent. It should adhere more to the standards of journalism - assuming that journalism has the truth. The memoir gives you more scope, is more poetic, and allows you to play around with your own life.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.

I try to write about things, places, events, and phenomena I know about personally. That helps make the novels more genuine.

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

When I write nonfiction, it's always absolutely true. There will be no moment in my nonfiction where I have made something up and have to apologize to the bullying hostess of a talk show.

My work was entirely nonfiction.

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

I sometimes say that I don't make anything up - obviously that's not true. But I am uninterested in writers who say that everything comes out of the imagination. I would rather be in a room with someone who is telling the story of his life, which may be exaggerated and even have lies in it, but I want to hear the true story, essentially.

All I write about is what's happened to me and to people I know, and the better I know them, the more likely they are to be written about.

What is truth? What is a true story? Who is telling the truth, and what is truth in this world today?

Autobiographical fiction is very tricky.

A memoir is not an autobiography. It's a true story told as a novel, using techniques of novelization. The author is allowed to compress events, combine characters, change names, change the sequence of events, just as if he's writing a novel. But it's got to be true.

Documentary is reality. It shows the truth.

I had to detach myself from myself, if that makes any sense, to conjure an authentic first-person voice. In that sense, it was similar to writing a first-person novel. But I was writing about real people, not fictional ones - myself, my family, my friends and boyfriends and ex-husband, and that was extremely tricky.

I actually find it pretty tedious when magazines ask me to write articles based on my real life, because I've already lived it and there's nothing new to discover. So, I'm unlikely to write a memoir.

I've never written an autobiographical novel in my life. I've never touched upon my life. I've never written a single scene that I can say took place.

Strange as it may seem, my life is based on a true story

For me, a memoir is nonfiction and nonfiction has to be absolutely true.

Every line is the actual experience with its own unique story.

If thou art wise, incline to truth; for truth, not the semblance, remains in its place.