Accident Quote by Elif Batuman

I've been thinking a lot about why it was so important to me to do The Idiot as a novel, and not a memoir.…

— Elif Batuman

I always wanted to write, ever since I was a kid. I started writing at the age of 11. All I wanted to do…

— Roger Zelazny

Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.

— Joan Didion

When I'm writing fiction I'm thinking, God, this is so hard - I have to make all this stuff up! I wish I were…

— Douglas Preston

Writing nonfiction, you're responsible to posterity, to history, to other people because the events happened, and you feel responsible to record them as they…

— Peter Heller

I suppose writing nonfiction did prepare me for writing fiction. Whenever you write anything, you're honing your skills for writing anything else.

— Elizabeth Berg

I can't even imagine writing nonfiction by hand. I think if I didn't have a computer, I just couldn't do it. Maybe it's a…

— Jennifer Egan

“Writing nonfiction means I tell people's stories for them, not because they're special but because we all are.”

— Jo Deurbrouck

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes…

— Joan Didion

It's exhausting writing nonfiction, particularly when it's personal. It's tiring, always speaking about things that are not necessarily fun retelling.

— Ishmael Beah

Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke…

— Joan Didion

I feel like I'm almost ready to write fiction about the border. But even after 10 years of writing nonfiction about it, I don't…

— William T. Vollmann