Finished Quote by Joan Didion

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

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

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

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

Nonfiction is both easier and harder to write than fiction. It's easier because the facts are already laid out before you, and there is…

— Amy Bloom

Everyone else thinks I'm a nonfiction writer. I think it's because my nonfiction is easier to find. But I write both in equal measure.…

— Roxane Gay

I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.

— Jonathan Franzen

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 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

“Writing is a physical art. And writing a book is a lot more like making a complex sculpture out of bronze than writing a…

— Heather Sellers

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

People seem to want to read more nonfiction than fiction.

— Bonnie Jo Campbell