Truman Capote Quotes

When you deal with nonfiction you deal with human characters.

My work was entirely nonfiction.

I try to write about things that actually happened so that I know it's real before I put it down on paper.

As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.

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.

I never really considered writing something that was nonfiction.

A memoir is not an autobiography. It's a true story told as a novel, using techniques of novelization. The author is allowed to compress events, combine characters, change names, change the sequence of events, just as if he's writing a novel. But it's got to be true.

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.

For me, a memoir is nonfiction and nonfiction has to be absolutely true.

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 already a narrative arc. What makes it harder is that you are not free to use your imagination and creativity to fill in any missing gaps within the story.

Nonfiction is more personal for me. It's more personal in that it's more direct, and actually it's always been more direct, even when I first started doing pieces.

The challenge for a nonfiction writer is to achieve a poetic precision using the documents of truth but somehow to make people and places spring to life as if the reader was in their presence.

I'm trying to tell a story and do it truthfully.

I write about true-life type things.

I think biography can be more personal than fiction, and certainly can be more expressive.

My purpose is to make my narrative as truthful as possible.

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

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.

Before I'm a writer, I'm definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true.

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

His theory was that non-fiction could be as artful as fiction.

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.

What I like about non-fiction is that it covers such a huge territory. The best non-fiction is also creative.

In a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre.