A Quote by Tom Wolfe

My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me.

Tom Wolfe

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About Career Entire Entire Career Fiction Like Like Me Me Nonfiction People Reported Written

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Tom Wolfe
American - Journalist
March 2, 1931 - May 14, 2018

I think, about the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. Fiction is not really about anything: it is what it is. But nonfiction - and you see this particularly with something like the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction - nonfiction we define in relation to what it's about. So, Stalingrad by Antony Beevor. It's "about" Stalingrad. Or, here's a book by Claire Tomalin: it's "about" Charles Dickens.

Geoff Dyer

I don't read much nonfiction because the nonfiction I do read always seems to be so badly written. What I enjoy about fiction - the great gift of fiction - is that it gives language an opportunity to happen.

Stanley Elkin

Prose gets divided up into fiction and nonfiction and short fiction and long fiction and autobiographical nonfiction and so on. Poetry can do any of those things except with the added definition of intensified formal pressure.

Robert Hass

I've been writing since 1973. I've written nonfiction things of that nature, but I'm probably best known for crime fiction and, to some extent, horror fiction.

Joe R. Lansdale

I have written a considerable amount - both fiction and nonfiction - about the Caribbean. My love for this part of the world is centered on a deep admiration for its people - a people who are both tough and romantic, dreamers and cynics, people who face a thousand defeats and are never defeated.

Mark Kurlansky

Great fiction has been written out of the very darkest circumstances of our narco violence, and nothing written in either fiction or nonfiction has penetrated that darkness so memorably - you can even say beautifully, a relentless riveting forensic dark beauty that some readers in fact find themselves unable to endure - as Roberto Bolaño's 2666. Especially in "The Part about the Crimes." But here's the thing: nobody would call 2666 a "narco novel."

Francisco Goldman

I've written fiction... but the nonfiction has always received the most attention.

Jim Murphy

We still go to nonfiction for content. And if it's well-written, that's a bonus. But we don't often talk about the nonfiction work of art. That's what I'm very interested in.

Geoff Dyer

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. This is a little outlandish".

Debra Monroe

I write fiction longhand. That's not so much about rejecting technology as being unable to write fiction on a computer for some reason. I don't think I would write it on a typewriter either. I write in a very blind gut instinctive way. It just doesn't feel right. There's a physical connection. And then in nonfiction that's not the case at all. I can't even imagine writing nonfiction by hand.

Jennifer Egan

I'm all about nonfiction. I rarely read fiction. I like to read about things that really happened, facts, real life situations. That's what inspires me.

Phil Keoghan

I started off doing fiction in 1993. It didn't occur to me to do nonfiction because it wasn't a thing yet. So I was bumbling around, writing short stories, and then I took a nonfiction workshop, and I realized that this was what I was supposed to do.

Meghan Daum

There's no division on my bookshelf between fiction and nonfiction. As far as I'm concerned, fiction is about the truth.

Arundhati Roy

I'm a writer and a feminist of color, and I've written complex, powerful women for my entire career. I'm just one voice, but there are many others like me.

Marjorie Liu

Some people don't like my fiction, because they prefer the nonfiction. But moving around keeps the work fresh for me and, hopefully, for my one or two readers who follow me from book to book!

Colson Whitehead

All fiction, if it's successful, is going to appeal to the emotions. Emotion is really what fiction is all about. That's not to say fiction can't be thoughtful, or present some interesting or provocative ideas to make us think. But if you want to present an intellectual argument, nonfiction is a better tool. You can drive a nail with a shoe but a hammer is a better tool for that. But fiction is about emotional resonance, about making us feel things on a primal and visceral level.

George R. R. Martin

A Quote by Tom Wolfe

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