E. L. Doctorow Quotes
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I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech.
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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.
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The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.
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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 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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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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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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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 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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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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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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The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
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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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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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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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It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.
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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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Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.
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Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
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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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My sense of what a book should be has changed so radically. I like to think for the better.
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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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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.
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In fiction, you know, there are no borders. You can go anywhere.