Top 30 E. L. Doctorow Quotes

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

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.

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.’

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Movies are too literal.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

A new reader shouldn’t be able to find you in your work, though someone who’s read more may begin to.

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.

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

Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.

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

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader – not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

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.

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.

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.

I have a number of vices, one of which is moderation.

I’ve outlasted many marriages at Random House.

Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.