E. L. Doctorow Quotes
Quotations and aphorisms by E. L. Doctorow:
I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
My father was the proprietor of a music shop on Forty-third Street, where many of the finest performers and musicians of the day would come to shop. He knew the classical repertoire inside out.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
Congress is so beholden to the money that any solution in the general interest will be frustrated and subverted by the corporate interests who feel they will be damaged by progress, fair play and justice.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
Things that appear on the front page of the newspaper as 'fact' are far more dangerous than the games played by a novelist, and can lead to wars.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
I'm not the sort of writer who can walk into a party and take a look around, see who's sleeping with whom and go home and write a novel about society. It's not the way I work.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
When you're writing a book, you don't really think about it critically. You don't want to know too well what you're doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
I discovered Einstein said the same thing about his celebrated theories of relativity that writers say about their work when he said he didn't have any feelings of personal possession of these ideas. Once they were out there, they came from somewhere else. And that's exactly the feeling when you write. You don't feel possessive about it.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
A period of time is as much an organising principle for a work of fiction as a sense of place. You can do geography, as Faulkner did, or you can dwell on a particular period. It provides the same framework.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing. I did that with 'World's Fair,' as with all of them. The inventions of the book come as discoveries.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
Each book tends to have its own identity rather than the author's. It speaks from itself rather than you. Each book is unlike the others because you are not bringing the same voice to every book. I think that keeps you alive as a writer.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
A new reader shouldn't be able to find you in your work, though someone who's read more may begin to.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
I started on computers with 'Billy Bathgate,' a little orange screen with black letters. I thought it was really cool, but it actually slowed me up for a while because it's so easy to revise, I tended to stay on the same page. I've learned to discipline myself.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
I can walk into a bookstore and hand over my credit card and they don't know who the hell I am. Maybe that says something about bookstore clerks.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
Somewhere along the line the rhythms and tonalities of music elided in my brain with the sounds that words make and the rhythm that sentences have.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
When I'm writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
My theory about why Hemingway killed himself is that he heard his own voice; that he reached the point where he couldn't write without feeling he was repeating himself. That's the worst thing that can happen to a writer.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
My sense of what a book should be has changed so radically. I like to think for the better.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
To have the regard of one's peers is immensely moving.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
When you're working well, you don't do research. Whatever you need comes to you.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
My books start almost before I realise it. Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now.'
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
I don't think anything I've written has been done in under six or eight drafts. Usually it takes me a few years to write a book. 'World's Fair' was an exception. It seemed to be a particularly fluent book as it came. I did it in seven months. I think what happened in that case is that God gave me a bonus book.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
There are two books that impressed me when I was very young. One was 'The Adventures of Augie March' - the idea of having something so generous, and so adventurous and improvisatory. The other was 'The U.S.A. Trilogy,' by John Dos Passos.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
Here's how it goes: I'm up at the stroke of 10 or 10:30. I have breakfast and read the papers, and then it's lunchtime. Then maybe a little nap after lunch and out to the gym, and before I know it, it's time to have a drink.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries just the way the reader does, so you're simultaneously the writer and the reader.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
It seems to me that in literature, books have always been answers to other books.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
From my undergraduate days, I've always been interested in the major philosophical questions that don't seem to have an answer that everyone agrees on.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
If we ever find out how the brain works, with all its complexity, then we will be able to build a machine that has consciousness. And if that happens, that is a road to planetary disaster because everything we've thought about ourselves, since the Bronze Age, the Bible, all of that will be gone.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
I've outlasted many marriages at Random House.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
People come out of the mid-west and go to the Ivy League. I kind of reversed the direction.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
Obama is a great man who's just beginning to understand the realities. And I'm not just saying that because he reads my books. I would have voted for him anyway.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
In fiction, you know, there are no borders. You can go anywhere.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
Movies are too literal.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
Washington is designed not to solve problems. Congress is so beholden to the money that any solution in the general interest will be frustrated and subverted by the corporate interests who feel they will be damaged by progress, fair play and justice.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state. It's become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
I have a number of vices, one of which is moderation.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
I got married very early, and in no time at all, we had three children. And it seemed to me I had an obligation to support them.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
The important thing is not to be too comfortable when you're writing. Noise in the street? That's good. The computer goes down? That's good. All these things are good. It has to be a little bit of a struggle.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
Suffering isn't a moral endowment. People don't always do well under duress, and it seemed to me to be truer to a fellow in that situation to make him angry.
~E. L. Doctorow
Link:
Share:
Permalink:
Browse: