E. L. Doctorow Quotes
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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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From my undergraduate days, I've always been interested in the major philosophical questions that don't seem to have an answer that everyone agrees on.
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Movies are too literal.
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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.
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I'm not the sort of writer who can walk into a party and take a look around, see who's sleeping with whom and go home and write a novel about society. It's not the way I work.
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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 like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist.
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I got married very early, and in no time at all, we had three children. And it seemed to me I had an obligation to support them.
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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 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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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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To have the regard of one's peers is immensely moving.
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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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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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The philosophical conservative is someone willing to pay the price of other people s suffering for his principles.
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Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.
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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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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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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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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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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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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 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.
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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.