Factual Writing Quotes

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.

I'm a fast writer, and crime novels are easy to do. It's much harder to write a 1,000 word article, where everything has to be 100 per cent correct.

But I don't read a lot of fiction. I prefer the nonfiction stuff.

The difference between fiction and nonfiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable.

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.

I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.

When a man wants to write a book full of unassailable facts, he always goes to the British Museum.

To me, the moment you're talking about nonfiction you're talking about reality.

I never did write a biography, and I don't exactly know how to set about it; you see I have to be accurate and keep to the facts, a most difficult thing for a writer of fiction.

Point of view is present in anything I write, but I really try to let the subject and facts speak for themselves.

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.

Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?

We still go to nonfiction for content. And if it's well-written, that's a bonus. But we don't often talk about the nonfiction work of art. That's what I'm very interested in.

I've always considered myself a nonfiction artist.

People seem to want to read more nonfiction than fiction.

Generally, I read nonfiction. There's very little fiction that I enjoy enough to spend my time reading. I am generally a nonfiction guy.

If the memoirist is borrowing narrative techniques from fiction, shouldn't the novelist borrow a few tricks from successful non-fiction?

But with nonfiction, the task is very straightforward: Do the research, tell the story.

There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

What I like about non-fiction is that it covers such a huge territory. The best non-fiction is also creative.

You can tell a more over-the-top incredible story if you use a nonfiction form.

Nonfiction is never going to die.

I have a lot of blurring between fiction and non-fiction in so many of my works. For example, my first novel, 'When Nietzsche Wept,' has a great deal of non-fiction in it. I didn't create many characters at all. Almost all of them are historical characters that actually existed.

His theory was that non-fiction could be as artful as fiction.