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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.
E. L. Doctorow -
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.
E. L. Doctorow
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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.
E. L. Doctorow -
We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy.
E. L. Doctorow -
I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist.
E. L. Doctorow -
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.
E. L. Doctorow -
To have the regard of one's peers is immensely moving.
E. L. Doctorow -
In fiction, you know, there are no borders. You can go anywhere.
E. L. Doctorow
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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.
E. L. Doctorow -
Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.
E. L. Doctorow -
I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.
E. L. Doctorow -
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.
E. L. Doctorow -
Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.
E. L. Doctorow -
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.
E. L. Doctorow
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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.
E. L. Doctorow -
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.
E. L. Doctorow -
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?
E. L. Doctorow -
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.
E. L. Doctorow -
The philosophical conservative is someone willing to pay the price of other people s suffering for his principles.
E. L. Doctorow -
A writer's life is so hazardous that anything he does is bad for him. Anything that happens to him is bad: failure's bad, success is bad; impoverishment is bad, money is very, very bad. Nothing good can happen... Except the act of writing.
E. L. Doctorow
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The theory of the teacher with all these immigrant kids was that if you spoke English loudly enough they would eventually understand.
E. L. Doctorow -
We are all good friends. Friendship is what endures. Shared ideals, respect for the whole character of a human being.
E. L. Doctorow -
I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them.
E. L. Doctorow -
It may be that the most avid readers of new fiction in America today are film producers, an indication of the trouble were in.
E. L. Doctorow