Back in the day Quote by John D'Agata

There is more to be pondered in the grain and texture of life than traditional fiction allows. The work of essayists is vital precisely…

— Charles J. Shields

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

I started writing nonfiction because nonfiction is well-suited to subjects that, if you wrote them as fiction, people would say, "I don't believe this.…

— Debra Monroe

What you create when you're teaching fiction writing is a kind of literary salon, not a social club or a mutual admiration society, not…

— John Dufresne

I tend to think of fiction as being mainly about characters and human beings and inner experience, whereas essays can be much more expository…

— David Foster Wallace

I'm interested in the possibility of fiction which straddles narrative and essay.

— Susan Sontag

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

I have lots of fiction in the drawer, but the essays I mostly kick out into the world, ready or not. Fiction incubates differently,…

— Charles D'Ambrosio

What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was…

— V. S. Naipaul

People seem to want to read more nonfiction than fiction.

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

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

I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it…

— Alexander Chee