Kathryn Harrison Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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.

It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.

When you deal with nonfiction you deal with human characters.

Most books aren't pure nonfiction or fiction.

If the memoirist is borrowing narrative techniques from fiction, shouldn't the novelist borrow a few tricks from successful non-fiction?

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

My work was entirely nonfiction.

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

We want a world with both historians and novelists, don't we? Not with one or the other. Every fiction writer crosses the line that divides artistry and documentation - or erases it.

I never really considered writing something that was nonfiction.

I really strived to give equal weight to the two halves of my genre's name: science and fiction.

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.

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."

I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it's not simply telling a story.

But with nonfiction, the task is very straightforward: Do the research, tell the story.

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.

I found that I could write two kinds of short stories: I could write very absurd, kind of surrealistic, funny stories; or I could write very dark, realistic - hyper-realistic - stories. I was never happy with that, because I couldn't meld the two.

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.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

When you write a song, the goal is not to convey the details of your life. You should write a memoir or something if that's what you're going to do.