I'm not a poet, but I was in the poetry program. And I'm also not much of a nonfiction writer, at least not in the standard sense of nonfiction, nor especially in the way we were thinking about nonfiction back then, in the late 90s.
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."
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.
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.
I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
I've always considered myself a nonfiction artist.
I like European and South American literature, but mostly I read nonfiction.
I don't actually have a one wellspring of inspiration. Though I'm most often inspired while reading - both fiction and nonfiction.
Most books aren't pure nonfiction or fiction.
With nonfiction, I go in trying to be really honest about what my preconceptions are.
I'm drawn to fiction that hints at nonfiction, that blurs or seems to blur the boundaries between invention and autobiography.
Nonfiction, for the most part, is facts, and it's "how I was mistreated. I was mistreated. Were you mistreated? Weren't we all mistreated?"
I always want to read Gore Vidal's nonfiction. Because everything he writes is an essay and it's worth reading.
It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.
I read a lot of nonfiction - especially books about the brain.
In reference works, as in sin, omission is as bad as willful misbehavior.
Nonfiction, qua label, is nothing more or less than a very flexible (easily breakable) frame that allows you to pull the thing away from narrative and toward contemplation, which is all I've ever wanted.
Every time I get through the work on a book of nonfiction, I say I'll never do it again; it takes so much out of you.
Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.
I read the same amount of nonfiction and fiction.
Nonfiction is easy and fiction is hard.
The hardest piece of nonfiction I ever wrote isn't anywhere close to the easiest piece of fiction I never wrote.
When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.
But I don't read a lot of fiction. I prefer the nonfiction stuff.
I love to read nonfiction and memoir, but I'm mostly interested in the piece of writing more than the person.
