E. L. Doctorow Quotes
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I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.
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Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.
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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.
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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.
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The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.
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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.
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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.
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It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
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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.
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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.
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The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
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Movies are too literal.
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My sense of what a book should be has changed so radically. I like to think for the better.
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Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.
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It may be that the most avid readers of new fiction in America today are film producers, an indication of the trouble were in.
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People come out of the mid-west and go to the Ivy League. I kind of reversed the direction.
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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.
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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.