E. L. Doctorow Quotes

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E. L. Doctorow

Profession : Author

Birth : January 6, 1931

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.

E. L. Doctorow

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.'

E. L. Doctorow

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

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

I've outlasted many marriages at Random House.

E. L. Doctorow

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

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

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

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

I discovered Einstein said the same thing about his celebrated theories of relativity that writers say about their work when he said he didn't have any feelings of personal possession of these ideas. Once they were out there, they came from somewhere else. And that's exactly the feeling when you write. You don't feel possessive about it.

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

My sense of what a book should be has changed so radically. I like to think for the better.

E. L. Doctorow

To have the regard of one's peers is immensely moving.

E. L. Doctorow