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" 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. "

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" 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

Planning

Doing

Writing

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

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

E. L. Doctorow

Book

Better

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

E. L. Doctorow

You

Know

" Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

New

Find

" 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. "

" 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

Long

Need

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

" 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. "

" 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

Way

Face

" 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. "

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

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

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

E. L. Doctorow

Society

Politics

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "