"There is in every human countenance either a history or a prophecy."
~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"I see no reason why the word [literature] should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry while the rest of us are lumped together under that despicable term 'nonfiction' -- as if we were some sort of remainder. I do not feel like a Non-something; I feel quite specific. I wish I could think of a name in place of 'Nonfiction.' In the hope of finding an antonym I looked up 'Fiction' in Webster and found it defined as opposed to 'Fact, Truth and Reality.' I thought for a while of adopting FTR, standing for Fact, Truth, and Reality, as my new term, but it is awkward to use. 'Writers of Reality' is the nearest I can come to what I want, but I cannot very well call us 'Realtors' because that has been pre-empted -- although as a matter of fact I would like to. 'Real Estate,' when you come to think of it, is a very fine phrase and it is exactly the sphere that writers of nonfiction deal in: the real estate of man, of human conduct. I wish I could get it back from the dealers in land. Then the categories could be poets, novelists, and realtors."
~ Barbara Tuchman, as quoted in "Creating Nonfiction" by Rachel Toor, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (12/3/07)
"First sentences are doors to worlds."
~ Ursula LeGuin
"Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book."
~ Attributed to Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106-43 BC
