E. L. Doctorow Quotes
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Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.
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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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I've always felt, as a writer, that radicals are fascinating because they're relations, they have a place in the American family. They're the relatives everyone wishes would go away. They're the embarrassments to decorum and good taste.
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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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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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The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.
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The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
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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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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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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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I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.
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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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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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My sense of what a book should be has changed so radically. I like to think for the better.
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Movies are too literal.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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.'
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A new reader shouldn't be able to find you in your work, though someone who's read more may begin to.
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Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.