A biography for E. L. Doctorowhasn’t been written yet.
“Movies are too literal.”
“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.”
“There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.”
“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 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.”
“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 an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.”
“I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries just the way the reader does, so you're simultaneously the writer and the reader.”
“Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.”
“The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.”
“To have the regard of one's peers is immensely moving.”
“Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist.”
“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 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.”
“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.”