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" 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
Party
Home
Look
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" People come out of the mid-west and go to the Ivy League. I kind of reversed the direction. "
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" Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go. "
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" I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction. "
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" 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. "
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" Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. "
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" I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech. "
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" The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity. "
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" 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. "
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" A new reader shouldn't be able to find you in your work, though someone who's read more may begin to. "
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" 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. "
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Lunch
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" 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. "
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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. "
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" I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority. "
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" I have a number of vices, one of which is moderation. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon. "
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" 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. "
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" I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad. "
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Avoid
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society. "
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" Movies are too literal. "
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" 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. "
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