Words matter. These are the best E. L. Doctorow Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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 try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.
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.
Movies are too literal.
I don’t think anything I’ve written has been done in under six or eight drafts. Usually it takes me a few years to write a book. ‘World’s Fair’ was an exception. It seemed to be a particularly fluent book as it came. I did it in seven months. I think what happened in that case is that God gave me a bonus book.
People come out of the mid-west and go to the Ivy League. I kind of reversed the direction.
I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist – or perhaps a national novelist.
To have the regard of one’s peers is immensely moving.
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.
When you’re working well, you don’t do research. Whatever you need comes to you.
A period of time is as much an organising principle for a work of fiction as a sense of place. You can do geography, as Faulkner did, or you can dwell on a particular period. It provides the same framework.
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.
Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.
I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.
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.
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.
Somewhere along the line the rhythms and tonalities of music elided in my brain with the sounds that words make and the rhythm that sentences have.
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.
The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.
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.
When you’re writing a book, you don’t really think about it critically. You don’t want to know too well what you’re doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it.
Here’s how it goes: I’m up at the stroke of 10 or 10:30. I have breakfast and read the papers, and then it’s lunchtime. Then maybe a little nap after lunch and out to the gym, and before I know it, it’s time to have a drink.
I thought I would lose, so I didn’t prepare a speech.
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.
Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader – not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
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.
A new reader shouldn’t be able to find you in your work, though someone who’s read more may begin to.
Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.
Obama is a great man who’s just beginning to understand the realities. And I’m not just saying that because he reads my books. I would have voted for him anyway.
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.
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.
If we ever find out how the brain works, with all its complexity, then we will be able to build a machine that has consciousness. And if that happens, that is a road to planetary disaster because everything we’ve thought about ourselves, since the Bronze Age, the Bible, all of that will be gone.
Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.
Suffering isn’t a moral endowment. People don’t always do well under duress, and it seemed to me to be truer to a fellow in that situation to make him angry.
