"In journalism, no matter how, to what degree or level a technique is done, one is moving horizontally. One never moves vertically. You almost never go down inside, you are moving horizontally on a narrative thing of personal comment one way or another and a superficial surface, horizontal narrative. The whole point about fiction is that you start out horizontally and at the first opportunity you go vertical, you're inside of the characters, deep inside the situation where you're god, moving vertically but your narrative is horizontal, you're moving vertically and horizontally at the same time, simultaneously. In reportage, most reportage, all reportage I can think of moves horizontally. One is always on the surface. Now, my point was that if someone could truly master a subject journalistically to the degree that you knew so much about it that you could with all honesty move in and out of the characters exactly as you would in a novel, that you knew so much about it, had so much command over it that in a work of journalism you could move horizontally and vertically at the same time. That was the whole point of In Cold Blood and the other thing is there's a technical innovation in that book which is that I the reporter never appear. They don't seem to realise this is the single most difficult thing in the whole thing and the reason I did it... it was almost a technical impossibility. The reason I did it was for the reason I call it a non-fiction novel, I wanted to prove that the reporter could be completely absented from the thing." - Graham Sergeant