Lee Gutkind Quotes

For a while I just couldn't imagine that there was a place for me in nonfiction. I looked around at what we were calling nonfiction and I thought, "Maybe you do have to go to poetry in order to do this other weird thing in nonfiction."

Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That's material that I really like.

And there are two types of stories. One type is one's own story. The other type is telling the stories of others. Thanks to this genre, writers of nonfiction can now use the tools of the reporter, the points of view and ear for dialog of a novelist, and the passion and wordplay of the poet.

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.

As a student at the time, I kind of felt like my only options as a nonfiction writer were to either jump on the personal essay bus or linger back at the station, hoping that some other heretofore unknown mode of transportation was going to magically show up to take me where I wanted to go.

What I'm really interested in, as a reader and as a writer, is the idea of the nonfiction book that is not defined by its content, by its "about"-ness. Where you read it irrespective of whether you're interested in the subject.

You can tell a more over-the-top incredible story if you use a nonfiction form.

In terms of going back and forth between fiction and nonfiction - in which I'll include memoir, biography, and true crime - is that one relieves the other.

There's nothing quite as exciting or moving as the very finest literary non-fiction.

I love Gene Weingarten's feature writing with the passion of a thousand suns.

I am a writer who happens to use some tools of journalism.

I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.

As I started to read nonfiction in the mid '70s, I discovered, holy cow, there was a lot of imaginative nonfiction. Not the kind where people use composite characters and invented quotes. I hate that kind of nonfiction. But imaginative in the sense that good writing and unexpected structure and vivid reporting could be combined with presenting facts.

If you write memoir, it can't be about blame or hurt; it has to be creative.

I've written many nonfiction books, but that's a special gift.

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

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

I've never had any interest at all in being a journalist or writing some sort of historically accurate autobiography.

There's always a bit of fiction in everything that I write.

I feel I'm functioning at some level as a journalist because even though I write fiction, I'm trying to get the world accurate.

Writers want to talk. They can't wait to tell you what they've been thinking. And because they've been in solitude, they've had some fairly decent thoughts.

I cling to the basic set of tenets laid out in Tom Wolfe's 'New Journalism' - to get out there like the great French novelists of the 19th century and study life. I am a Tom Wolfe fan of the first order.

Because the kind of nonfiction I write has a plot, the events and transactions that make up a life, nonfiction offers me a break from plotting.

A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I'm creating a form of fiction.

I'd read Up in the Old Hotel, and I wanted to do something with Mitchell's stuff for a long time.