E.L. Doctorow Quotes

E.L. Doctorow writes a reflective, plain-spoken look at writing as a journey in the dark.

36 quotes

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

#1
Planning to write is not writing. Outlining ...researching ...talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.

#2
There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.

#3
You can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again.

#4
Murders are exciting and lift people into a heart-beating awe as religion is supposed to do, after seeing one in the street young couples will go back to bed and make love, people will cross themselves and thank God for the gift of their stuporous lives, old folks will talk to each other over cups of hot water with lemon because murders are enlivened sermons to be analyzed and considered and relished, they speak to the timid of the dangers of rebellion, murders are perceived as momentary descents of God and so provide joy and hope and righteous satisfaction to parishioners, who will talk about them for years afterward to anyone who will listen.

#5
Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.

#6
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

#7
It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

#8
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.

#9
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.

#10
I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.

#11
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.

#12
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.
There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.
Most people are quiet in the world, and live in it tentatively, as if it were not their own.
It is the immigrant hordes who keep this country alive, the waves of them arriving year after year… Who believes in America more than the people who run down the gangplank and kiss the ground?
A book begins as a private excitement of the mind.
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.
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.
Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.
The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.
Uncharged with invisible meaning, the visible is nothing, mere clay; and without visible circumstance, a territory, to connect to, our spirit is shapeless, nameless, and undefined.
I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.
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.
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.
A writer's life is so hazardous that anything he does is bad for him. Anything that happens to him is bad: failure's bad, success is bad; impoverishment is bad, money is very, very bad. Nothing good can happen... Except the act of writing.
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.
It may be that the most avid readers of new fiction in America today are film producers, an indication of the trouble were in.
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.
A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.
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.
I've always felt, as a writer, that radicals are fascinating because they're relations, they have a place in the American family. They're the relatives everyone wishes would go away. They're the embarrassments to decorum and good taste.
A writer of books has to admit that film is the enemy, and that in my case I have been sleeping with the enemy.
Images break with a small ping, their destruction is as wonderful as their being, they are essentially instruments of torture exploding through the individual's calloused capacity to feel undifferentiated emotions full of longing and dissatisfaction and monumentality.
People come out of the mid-west and go to the Ivy League. I kind of reversed the direction.
Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing - none of that is writing. Writing is writing. 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.