There is a great history of books that began as speech. Plato recorded Socrates's dialogues; the New Testament is a document of what Jesus and his disciples said (and, for some, the entire Bible is a transcription of the word of God). The poetry of Homer was spoken first - and to what extent were the Grimm brothers just writing down the words of the villagers they encountered on their travels? But my list is more contemporary: from the age of the tape recorder to now.

For the past seven or eight years, I have been using the things people say as the raw material for my books, and ordinary speech has been my inspiration. The Chairs are Where the People Go was told to me by my friend Misha Glouberman; I typed as he talked. In How Should a Person Be? the transcribed dialogues between me and my friends help form the structure of the book. Most fiction writers are driven to find their own "voice," but I am more interested in the voices of others. Everyone is their own kind of poet – you can't miss it when their words are written down. At the same time, there's a ghostly quality about transcribed speech. The important absences (of body, gesticulation, and intonation) haunt the written sentences. The gaps speak, too.

1. I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews edited by Kenneth Goldsmith

Few figures in the 20th century spoke as deliberately as Andy Warhol, who always erred on the side of saying less, or seemingly nothing at all. Yet while his manner infuriated interviewers at the time, seen from today in his collected interviews, he is not only hilarious and wise, but reads like he's the only one telling the truth. "'What do you hope to do in films?' Warhol: 'Well, just find interesting things and film them.'"

2. Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do by Studs Terkel

Published in 1972, this groundbreaking book by the great American oral history genius documented America's relationship with work. Terkel spoke with prostitutes, housewives, gravediggers, everyone (many of the jobs included don't exist anymore, or don't exist in the same way). The monologues are crafted invisibly, and each voice is direct and distinct. "It's an automatic thing, waiting on people," says a washroom attendant. "It doesn't require any thought. It's almost a reflex action. I set my toilet articles up, towels – and I'm ready." Americans had never seen themselves quite so clearly before - and oral history became a more prominent form as a result.

3. US: Americans Talk About Love edited by John Bowe

A series of monologues edited down from interviews, in the style pioneered by Terkel. The book's subjects speak candidly about their current romantic relationship, whether it's in its first week or its 60th year: "I made it very clear that this relationship was not going to end when he wanted to end it. It will end when I want to end it." Amid all the clichés about what relationships are like, the book reveals how unique our experiences with love actually are.

4. I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, translated by Maurice Frydman

This profound, spiritual classic collects dialogues between the Indian guru and his questioner (in fact, many questioners; seekers who made pilgrimages to talk with him daily). He speaks out of the Advaitan philosophical tradition, focusing on consciousness, reality, and the relationship between the Self and the Whole: "There is no such thing as a person. There are only restrictions and limitations."

5. Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexivich

I have read few books as devastating as this. Alexivich interviewed victims of the 1986 nuclear disaster, and from the fragmentation of voices – like shards of glass, swept into a pile – one comes to see that human oversight can be more scary and destructive even than human evil. The first monologue is spoken by a woman whose husband worked at the reactor, and whom she insisted on tending to as he died a gruesome death over two weeks. The nurses plead with her to stay away from him: "That's not a person anymore, that's a nuclear reactor. You'll just burn together."

6. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain

One popular oral history approach is to weave what numerous people have said into a single narrative (see also: George Plimpton's touching Edie: An American Biography about Edie Sedgwick). In Please Kill Me, one feels as if one is stuck in a dark, dirty room, listening to a loud-mouthed Danny Fields, and the Stooges, and the Ramones, all describing an ambitious and cruel world. Wayne Kramer says: "We were sexist bastards … and if the girls did complain, they were being bourgeois bitches – counter-revolutionary. Yep, we were really shitty about it."

7. It Chooses You by Miranda July

Miranda July is trying to make a movie (The Future), but she procrastinates by visiting random people selling things through a free catalogue. She tape-records her funny and intimate interactions with them, and binds them together with a narrative of her frustrations with wasting time in this way. The book is a wonderful companion to the film, and reveals how mysterious the artistic process is. You think you're procrastinating, but what you're really doing is making this beautiful book.

8. Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin by Kenny Shopsin and Carolynn Carreno

This book of essays and recipes conveys the salty, aggressive, emotional voice of Kenny Shopsin, who owned and operated Shopsin's, the idiosyncratic New York diner. An entertaining philosopher of family, food and business, he's at his best when he's barely trying. Outlining the provenance of his many sandwich names, he admits that lots "just come from the fact that I like someone and was thinking about him or her at the time I was creating the sandwich".

9. Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Conversations with Robert Irwin by Lawrence Weschler

Weschler, a former New Yorker journalist, interviewed Robert Irwin about the fluctuations in his artistic approach over the decades. Irwin is the perfect subject because his work is so conceptual and environmental, his memory is great, and because for almost his entire career he didn't let anyone document his work in photographs. Here, Weschler puts us into the headspace of a fascinating artist, in a book about the artistic process I haven't seen matched.

10. Soliloquy by Kenneth Goldsmith

Goldsmith, an experimental poet, taped every word and utterance he made during the course of one week in 1996. No one knew it (he rigged his headphones to a tape deck and wore it everywhere). The result is compelling and banal, and shows how ridiculous we are most of the time: "Cheryl. She was so happy this morning when she put this outfit together. Look at the shoes. Look at the shoes. I don't want to talk about it. Look at the haircut going on here."

Sheila Heti is interviews editor at the Believer magazine. She is the author of five books: the story collection, The Middle Stories; the novel, Ticknor; and an illustrated book for children, We Need a Horse featuring art by Clare Rojas. With Misha Glouberman, she wrote a book of "conversational philosophy" called The Chairs Are Where the People Go, which The New Yorker chose as one of its Best Books of 2011. How Should a Person Be? is published by Harvill Secker. Buy it from the Guardian bookshop.