Nonfiction Novel Quotes

“Other books depended less on personal contacts than on certain abiding concerns. Early in his career, Dreiser had become interested in a crime that he saw as a dark version of the American success motif: the murder of a woman who stood in the way of her lover’s dreams of social and material advancement through a more advantageous marriage. For An American Tragedy (1925) he investigated numerous case histories, many of them sensational murders involving well-known figures such as Roland Molineux and Harry Thaw. He finally settled on the 1906 Chester Gillette trial for the murder of Grace Brown that occurred in the lake district of upstate New York. The novel benefited from the popular interest in criminal biography, a form to which Dreiser’s masterpiece gave new life as the progenitor of documentary novels of crime such as Richard Wright’s Native Son, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song.

The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser”
― Thomas P. Riggio, An American Tragedy

“The system has your brain. They evaluate it to let you. A mafia of established people, your competition, wants to destroy you and functions as Geppetto planting false negative things into your brain and body. Fake news. Wrong accusations.”
― Maria Karvouni, You Are Always Innocent

“First there is fantasy. And then there is reality. And then again fantasy. And then again reality.”
― Maria Karvouni, Reality Is Just A Possible Fantasy