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All Quotes by author - 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" I've outlasted many marriages at Random House. "

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

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