Quote

While I love to read contemporary fiction, I'm not drawn to writing it. Perhaps it's because the former journalist in me is too inhibited by the press of reality; when I think about writing of my own time I always think about nonfiction narratives. Or perhaps it's just that I find the present too confounding.

I don't do nonfiction anymore. Eventually, you just feel constrained by the facts. You want to go where the words take you, and people's actual lives don't always conform. And you can't know them that well.

I always squirm when I read what's called 'creative nonfiction,' and the writer is lobbing gobs of emotion and language at the world, hoping some of it will stick.

I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction.

With fiction, you can take something that bothers you, or that you don't have in clear focus, and you can put it under as much stress as you want. Really get underneath the skin. With nonfiction, you're restricted to what happened.

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

Fiction is harder for me than nonfiction - more gratifying, as a result, when it succeeds.

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.

Writing a nonfiction story is like cracking a safe. It seems impossible at the beginning, but once you're in, you're in.