E.L. Doctorow Quotes

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.

All secrets become deep. All secrets become dark. That's in the nature of secrets.

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 in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.

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

Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor.

I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them.

The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.

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.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacy.

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

Write even when the world is chaotic. You don’t need a cigarette, silence, music, a comfortable chair, or inner peace to write. You just need ten minutes and a writing implement.

The fact is, almost everything you do is collaborative. Somewhere out there, someone else had a hand it it.

Universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time in the history of the world. This is not a bad thing.

The big problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.

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

The poem is a cry of the unborn heart. Yes, because the poem perfectly embodies the world, there is no world without poem.

We don’t care about what you did yesterday—we care about what you’re going to do tomorrow.

I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.

Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

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

All over the world today, not just in the totalitarian countries, assiduous functionaries in Ministries of Truth are clubbing history dumb and rendering language insensible.

A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.

A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.

I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.

Put simply, I want to treat my readers as partners and not crooks. There is no future in calling your most active promoters crooks.

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

Take it from someone who's read the Wikipedia entry: this is how the Ottoman Empire was won: madden horsemen fueled by lethal jet-black coffee-mud.

Engineers are all basically high-functioning autistics who have no idea how normal people do stuff.

Any time someone puts a lock on something you own against your wishes, and doesn't give you the key, they're not doing it for your benefit.

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

The accolade of your peers is very exciting, always. There's lots of good stuff on the ballot.

... the Kindle is a "roach motel" device: its license terms and DRM ensure that books can check in, but they can't check out.

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.

It's the stupid questions that have some of the most surprising and interesting answers. Most people never think to ask the stupid questions.

What if I got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? Ban umbrellas! Fight the menace of lightning!

The other one I did was "I, Robot." I take apart Isaac Asimov's Robots world.

It may be hard to monetize fame, but it is impossible to monetize obscurity.

Skipping school isn't a crime. It's an infraction. They're totally different.

It is a mistake to let aesthetics drive your rational decision making.

I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.

The act of composition is a series of discoveries.

Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.

Like all security, privacy is hard.

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.

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'd never been a tall guy, and the girls I'd dated had all been my height--teenaged girls grow faster than guys, which is a cruel trick of nature.

Planning to write is not writing.

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. Sometimes you run over a drunk who's lain down and fallen asleep on the warm pavement. I mean, do you keep going, or what?