Narrative Non-Fiction Quotes

Even the two novels I've written were based on true stories. It's how I'm wired - real life is fascinating and fantastical enough. The kind of journalism I did unpeeled lids from cans otherwise sealed.

I love documentaries. It's actually my favorite medium of film.

I've written one book-length piece of journalism. The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed Bishop Gerardi? That book had an impact. Eight years after it was published it's still having an impact in Guatemala. I remember when I wrote it, a surprising number of people said things to me like, "That is such an amazing story; why didn't you turn it into a novel?"

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

We are living in an era of such interesting new forms, and certainly narrative non-fiction has emerged as a major form. People who are great writers don't have to write novels anymore.

I honestly believe that everything I know about the writing of non-fiction (or writing) could be engraved on the head of a pin with a garden hoe.

Documentaries have always inspired me in narrative filmmaking.

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.

It's a funny thing with documentary films - you want them to feel as entertaining and as gripping as a fictional film. With a fictional film you want it to feel as realistic as a documentary film.

Probably the biggest influence on my career was the late John Hersey, who, while he was at 'The New Yorker,' wrote one of the masterpieces of narrative non-fiction, 'Hiroshima.' Hersey was a teacher of mine at Yale, and a friend. He got me to see the possibility of journalism not just as a business but as an art form.