E. L. Doctorow Quotes
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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.
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I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.
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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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It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.
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The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
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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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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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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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Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.
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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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Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
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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.
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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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In fiction, you know, there are no borders. You can go anywhere.
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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.