E. L. Doctorow Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
-
People come out of the mid-west and go to the Ivy League. I kind of reversed the direction.
-
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.
-
I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist.
-
In fiction, you know, there are no borders. You can go anywhere.
-
To have the regard of one's peers is immensely moving.
-
We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy.
-
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.
-
It may be that the most avid readers of new fiction in America today are film producers, an indication of the trouble were in.
-
Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.
-
I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.
-
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.
-
And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.
-
The philosophical conservative is someone willing to pay the price of other people s suffering for his principles.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?
-
It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.
-
We are all good friends. Friendship is what endures. Shared ideals, respect for the whole character of a human being.
-
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.
-
The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.