Non-Fiction Writing Quotes

I think it's hard to have a full-time job and write fiction, but for essays, you need to be in the world.

I really think more fledgling novelists - and many current and even established novelists - should get out into the real world and cover local politics, sports, culture, and crime and write it up on deadline.

Novels are my favorite to write and read. I do like writing personal essays, too. I'm not really a short story writer, nor do I tend to gravitate to them as a reader.

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.

Janet Malcolm's probably the writer I most admire and who's most influenced me.

In high school, I was very active in extracurricular activities such as art, theatre, and choir. I also wrote for the school newspaper, but not regularly, because I never liked writing non-fiction very much.

Novel writing should never be confused with journalism. Unfortunately, in the case of Primary Colors, a fair number of journalists confused.

The subject for a lot of non-fiction is very emotional, but if you read it, it's the most boring, dry stuff. I wanted 'Torn Apart' to be extremely accessible and readable.

I have been tossing around the idea of writing some non-fiction. Maybe a collection of short stories about my experience being a mom and how not to be perfect.

How you solve your problems are quite different. In non-fiction, you can always go back to the research, whereas in fiction, you have to go back to yourself - which is a little bit scary.

I think some people wished I'd kept myself out of the book. But I kind of insist on it because I want the reader to share my engagement with the material, if you like, not pretend that I'm doing it completely intellectually.

Every writer dreams of having the ability to hold forth for 8,000 words and pull all these different forms together: history, reportage, journalism. That was all I really wanted, and 'The Atlantic' was my first high-profile opportunity.

[Tom] Wolfe's books offered a whole new world to step into, and whilst at times you could accuse him of being somewhat long-winded, he had an incredible quality of prose and a bravery of writing from the heart. He believed in being autobiographical at all times.

Subject is very important. If you're going to write non-fiction the style means nothing or very little. The content justifies the effort you need to put into the writing itself.

Journalists in newspapers and in many magazines are not permitted to be subjective and tell their readers what they think. Journalists have got to follow a very strict formulaic line, and here we come, these non-fiction writers, these former journalists who are using all the techniques that journalists are pretty much not allowed to use.

I thought Bill Bryson's 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' was remarkable. Managing to be entertaining while still delivering all that hard science was a pretty good trick to pull off.

When you're not doing fiction, there's a limit to how much illustrating you can do with your work. I mean, you can do fine. There are great non-fiction writers, but people aren't necessarily going to say anything that reveals them as much as a picture might. Even their surroundings, in lot of cases, the things that meant the most to me were the things I noticed in their houses. I was always looking, as much as I was listening to them. I was looking around for clues as to why I was there.

The one thing fiction and non-fiction writing have in common for me is that sense of trying to get the sentences to be minimal but at the same time be a little overfull - to encourage them to do a kind of poetic work.

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

I never recreate dialogue. I have often been asked by people, 'You must have made this up because this is dialogue, right?' Anything in my books that is in quotes comes from some kind of living historical document: a letter, a memoir, a court transcript, a newspaper interview.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I'm 100 percent fiction writer... I don't want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don't state my political messages to anybody.

I like writing non-fiction - and when you pick a [non-fiction] subject, it saves you the hassle of coming up with a plot.

I think, when you are writing non-fiction, you feel there's an obligation to get it absolutely right, so all your factual details have to be, have, you know, to go through a long list of them and tick them. I'm not saying that's not important in fiction, but I think you have a bit more leeway; you can suit yourself.

With non-fiction writing I feel like I'm confined and driven by what actually happened. That makes the "plot". So it's a process of getting all of my notes typed up, then scanning through the notes, trying to extract or find certain vignettes that seem like they might write well - that might have a potential for good energy, shape, etc. And then at some point I start stringing these together, keeping an eye on the word count.

I've read plenty of amazing science pieces where the writers don't hang out in labs. I just have fun doing it. And I get rewarded for it; I get gushy, especially when kids tell me they expected to be bored by my books, but weren't.