E. L. Doctorow

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”

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

“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 did that with 'World's Fair,' as with all of them. The inventions of the book come as discoveries.”

“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 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.”

“Things that appear on the front page of the newspaper as 'fact' are far more dangerous than the games played by a novelist, and can lead to wars.”

“It seems to me that in literature, books have always been answers to other books.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.'”

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

“Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.”

“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.”