E. L. Doctorow Quotes

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E. L. Doctorow

Profession : Author

Birth : January 6, 1931

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.

E. L. Doctorow

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

E. L. Doctorow

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

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

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

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

I have a number of vices, one of which is moderation.

E. L. Doctorow

I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

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

E. L. Doctorow

The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

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

E. L. Doctorow

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

E. L. Doctorow

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

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow