QuoteProject
The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That's not true with non-fiction.
Tom Wolfe
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Fiction requires believability, while non-fiction is based on real events and facts.

Tom Wolfe highlights a fundamental difference between fiction and non-fiction in this quote. In fiction, the narrative must maintain a certain level of plausibility to resonate with readers and feel authentic, while non-fiction, grounded in reality, doesn't face the same constraints and can deal with complexities and absurdities that are true to life.

Themes

FictionNon-FictionPlausibilityRealityWriting

In practice

Example use cases

In a literature class discussing the boundaries of genre.

More from Tom Wolfe

No machines will ever truly fully figure the brain out, because the brain's performance is constantly altered or else constrained by this inanimate, rogue artifact you can't control, namely, speech.
Tom WolfeRead
And - of course! - the Non-people. The whole freaking world was full of people who were bound to tell you they weren't qualified to do this or that but they were determined to go ahead and do just that thing anyway.
Tom WolfeRead
The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.
Tom WolfeRead
Driving a stock car does not require much handling ability, at least not as compared to Grand Prix racing, because the tracks are simple banked ovals and there is almost no shifting of gears. So, qualifying becomes a test of raw nerve - of how fast a man is willing to take a curve.
Tom WolfeRead
I have discovered that for me - now, maybe it doesn't work for everybody - for me, it is much more effective to arrive at any situation as a man from Mars than to try to fit in.
Tom WolfeRead
There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous - and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone.
Tom WolfeRead

Similar quotes

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
John SteinbeckRead
With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.
David HalberstamRead
Size matters in fiction, but so does lack of size. Everything else being equal, fat novels tend to be perceived as serious, very thin ones as more honest, more real. Writers address these age-old expectations by filling their big books with philosophy and cramming their little ones with feeling.
Walter KirnRead
Race is the true protagonist of the American novel. Our most popular classic fictions have known this, from 'Moby Dick' to 'Beloved;' all these books take on race or talk it out, often in other forms; they are less 'horror stories for boys' than ghost stories from a haunted conscience.
Kevin YoungRead
If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.
Evelyn WaughRead
Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.
Ezra PoundRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.