E. L. Doctorow Quotes

"It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

"Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go."

"Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

"Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon."

"Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society."

"Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake."

"There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative."

"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."

"I've outlasted many marriages at Random House."

"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."

"In fiction, you know, there are no borders. You can go anywhere."

"People come out of the mid-west and go to the Ivy League. I kind of reversed the direction."

"The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century."

"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."

"Washington is designed not to solve problems. Congress is so beholden to the money that any solution in the general interest will be frustrated and subverted by the corporate interests who feel they will be damaged by progress, fair play and justice."

"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."

"I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech."

"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."

"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."

"Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing."

"We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy."

"I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad."

"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."

"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."

"I can walk into a bookstore and hand over my credit card and they don't know who the hell I am. Maybe that says something about bookstore clerks."

"Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially."

"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."

"Each book tends to have its own identity rather than the author's. It speaks from itself rather than you. Each book is unlike the others because you are not bringing the same voice to every book. I think that keeps you alive as a writer."

"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."

"A new reader shouldn't be able to find you in your work, though someone who's read more may begin to."