E. L. Doctorow Quotes

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E. L. Doctorow

Profession : Author

Birth : January 6, 1931

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

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

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

E. L. Doctorow

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

When you're working well, you don't do research. Whatever you need comes to you.

E. L. Doctorow

Movies are too literal.

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

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.

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

E. L. Doctorow

Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.

E. L. Doctorow

I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist.

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.

E. L. Doctorow