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" Somewhere along the line the rhythms and tonalities of music elided in my brain with the sounds that words make and the rhythm that sentences have. "
E. L. Doctorow
Music
Along
Brain
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" I've outlasted many marriages at Random House. "
E. L. Doctorow
House
Many
Marriages
" It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. "
E. L. Doctorow
Way
Car
Driving
" We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy. "
E. L. Doctorow
Raw
Little
Where
" 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
Books
Idea
Me
" My sense of what a book should be has changed so radically. I like to think for the better. "
E. L. Doctorow
Book
Like
Better
" 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
Children
Early
Got
" 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. "
E. L. Doctorow
World
Done
Book
" 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
Now
Start
Say
" The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity. "
E. L. Doctorow
Nature
Good
Fiction
" 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
" Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction. "
E. L. Doctorow
Composition
Music
You
" I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad. "
E. L. Doctorow
Avoid
Most
Experience
" To have the regard of one's peers is immensely moving. "
E. L. Doctorow
Immensely
Peers
Moving
" Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon. "
E. L. Doctorow
Raining
Feeling
Fact
" There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative. "
E. L. Doctorow
Nonfiction
Fiction
Only
" 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
Everyone
Days
Questions
" 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
Good
Struggle
You
" 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. "
E. L. Doctorow
Games
Newspaper
Page
" 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
Time
Lunch
Know
" 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
People
Suffering
Angry
" It seems to me that in literature, books have always been answers to other books. "
E. L. Doctorow
Books
Always
Answers
" 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
" 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
Justice
Money
Play
" 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
" 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. "
E. L. Doctorow
Think
Writing
You
" Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go. "
E. L. Doctorow
Learn
You
Writing
" Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society. "
E. L. Doctorow
Like
Society
Politics
" 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. "
E. L. Doctorow
Myself
Black
Thought
" 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
Like
Long
Need
" 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
Saying
Great Man
Great