Lee Gutkind Quotes

I think you can do a lot with fiction, and in some cases you can say even more in fiction than you can in straight-up documentary journalism.

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.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

The best writers attempt to become alternative historians.

Newspaper reporting is really storytelling. We call our articles 'stories,' and we try to tell them in a way that even people who don't know all the background can understand them.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.

I want to tell stories for everyone, primarily.

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.

It turned out I really didn't like journalism. I wanted to make up stories, not cover real events.

Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.

Fact-checking is so boring compared to writing fiction.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.

True stories are way more interesting.

Fiction is my deepest love, but I love journalism, too. It keeps me thinking vigorously, and it reminds me that there is a world out there.

If I feel like I haven't really tapped into the essence of the story when I do an assignment, I may revisit it on my own, and that's when I feel freer to add my imagination. But I think that if you feel imaginatively towards a subject, you really shouldn't do it in a journalistic context, because then you're just fabricating, and that's crazy.

Fiction writing and journalism, in my experience, are really excellent training grounds for each other.

In my writing, I try to combine all my favorite elements of journalism - accuracy, real characters that exist on this planet - with all my favorite elements of literature: a sense of flow, of propulsion, of wanting to read every sentence.

With non-fiction, there is the struggle to be accurate. With fiction, it is a bit different: the desire to let imagination take you to new places.

You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.

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.

The first lie of fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life: chronological order, or whatever order the author chooses.

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.

Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?