Calling Quote by John D'Agata

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

— Rich Cohen

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'm not a poet, but I was in the poetry program. And I'm also not much of a nonfiction writer, at least not in…

— John D'Agata

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

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 never paid attention when people said, "That's gotta be poetry. That's gotta be fiction," except when I was in a graduate program, and…

— Sandra Cisneros

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

My work was entirely nonfiction.

— Laura Hillenbrand

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

At least for me, it takes more knowledge to write fiction than nonfiction. At least about someplace that I begin with a lot of…

— William T. Vollmann

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

— Joan Didion