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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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" 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

Road

Age

Thought

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

E. L. Doctorow

Society

Politics

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

" There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

E. L. Doctorow

Perhaps

Myself

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

E. L. Doctorow

You

Know

" 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.' "

" 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. "