Contemplation Quote by David Shields

Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.

— Barbara Kingsolver

Nonfiction ties your hands a bit, and just like writing poetry in rhyme, it can force you to make more brutal decisions in terms…

— Emily Susan Rapp

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

— Rick Moody

Nonfiction gives you subjects. Writing fiction I can have more fun, but I have to invent my subject.

— Lynne Tillman

The challenge of nonfiction is keeping the attention of a reader over span of time, and to keep the quality of the writing as…

— Ted Genoways

“Nonfiction at its best is like fashioning a cabinet. It can be elegant and very beautiful but it can never be sculpture. Captive to…

— Peter Matthiessen

Fiction stymies me with its possibility. I can't see the bottom and I freeze, cling to the side, or just choke. In nonfiction, particularly…

— Melissa Febos

Narrative nonfiction was not my forte. I always wanted to let my imagination run free, and the facts sometimes got in the way. At…

— Douglas Florian

Maybe I have a one-track mind, but the best writers and thinkers are focusing on nonfiction these days; this is the genre where a…

— Lee Gutkind

Writing a nonfiction story is like cracking a safe. It seems impossible at the beginning, but once you're in, you're in.

— Rich Cohen

The pleasure of nonfiction is that it takes all of that sort of artistic and observational skill, but then there's a more intellectual layer…

— Ted Genoways

Nonfiction writers are the packhorses of literature. We're meant to carry the story. If we can make it up and down the mountain by…

— Stacy Schiff