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" 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. "
E. L. Doctorow
Down
Yourself
You
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" When you're working well, you don't do research. Whatever you need comes to you. "
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Need
Working
Well
" To have the regard of one's peers is immensely moving. "
E. L. Doctorow
Immensely
Peers
Moving
" 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. "
E. L. Doctorow
People
Relationships
Always
" There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative. "
E. L. Doctorow
Nonfiction
Fiction
Only
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
E. L. Doctorow
Time
Place
Work
" 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. "
E. L. Doctorow
Identity
You
Voice
" Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially. "
E. L. Doctorow
Forms
Writing
Short
" People come out of the mid-west and go to the Ivy League. I kind of reversed the direction. "
E. L. Doctorow
People
Out
Kind
" 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
Like
Way
Face
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
E. L. Doctorow
Myself
Find
Learn
" I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech. "
E. L. Doctorow
Lose
Prepare
Speech
" I have a number of vices, one of which is moderation. "
E. L. Doctorow
Number
Moderation
Which
" I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist. "
E. L. Doctorow
Perhaps
Like
Myself
" 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
Play
Justice
Feel
" 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
" 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 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. "
E. L. Doctorow
Way
Find
First
" I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad. "
E. L. Doctorow
Avoid
Most
Experience
" 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. "
E. L. Doctorow
Reading
Book
Think
" Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society. "
E. L. Doctorow
Like
Society
Politics
" 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
" I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority. "
E. L. Doctorow
Culture
Authority
Then
" 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
" The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity. "
E. L. Doctorow
Nature
Good
Fiction
" 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
" 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