E. L. Doctorow Quotes
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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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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 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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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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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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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.
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Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
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In fiction, you know, there are no borders. You can go anywhere.
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We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy.
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I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist.
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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.
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To have the regard of one's peers is immensely moving.
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Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.
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And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.
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I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.
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The philosophical conservative is someone willing to pay the price of other people s suffering for his principles.
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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.
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And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.
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Because like all whores you value propriety. You are creature of capitalism, the ethics of which are so totally corrupt and hypocritical that your beauty is no more than the beauty of gold, which is to say false and cold and useless.
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Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. Sometimes you run over a drunk who's lain down and fallen asleep on the warm pavement. I mean, do you keep going, or what?
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Satire's nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.
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All over the world today, not just in the totalitarian countries, assiduous functionaries in Ministries of Truth are clubbing history dumb and rendering language insensible.
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The Shadow had no imagination. He neither looked at naked women nor thought of ridding the world of dictators like Hitler or Mussolini.
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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.