E. L. Doctorow Quotes
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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. I did that with 'World's Fair' as with all of them. The inventions of the book come as discoveries.
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There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.
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There is really no fiction or non-fiction; there is only narrative. One mode of perception has no greater claim on the truth than the other; that the distance has perhaps to do with distance - narrative distance - from the characters; it has to do with the kind of voice that is talking, but it certainly hasn't to do with the common distribution between fact and imagination.
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The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
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A writer of books has to admit that film is the enemy, and that in my case I have been sleeping with the enemy.
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I have been everywhere because I don't know what I'm looking for.
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Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.
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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?
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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.
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What we call fiction is the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies....Fiction is democratic, it reasserts the authority of the single mind to make and remake the world.
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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.
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I've known several cases of writers who decide to write about something and they research the hell out of it and when they're ready to write, they can't move because they are so burdened. I start writing. Whatever I need somehow comes to hand.
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The music of the Stones pounds the air like the amplified pulse of my erection.
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I lived in New York for a couple months. It seemed to me at first an incredibly clean place with well-dressed people and washed cars and bright-painted red-and-yellow streetcars and white buildings.
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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.
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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.
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I knew he was unreliable, but he was fun to be with. He was a child’s ideal companion, full of surprises and happy animal energy. He enjoyed food and drink. He liked to try new things. He brought home coconuts, papayas, mangoes, and urged them on our reluctant conservative selves. On Sundays he liked to discover new places, take us on endless bus or trolley rides to some new park or beach he knew about. He always counseled daring, in whatever situation, the courage to test the unknown, an instruction that was thematically in opposition to my mother’s.
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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.
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The Shadow had no imagination. He neither looked at naked women nor thought of ridding the world of dictators like Hitler or Mussolini.
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I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.
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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.
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I worry about images. Images are what things mean.
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Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.
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Banks and churches and courtrooms all depend on the appurtenances of theatre. On illusion. Banks, the illusion of stability and honourable dealings to the rot and corruption of capitalist exploitation. Churches the illusion of sacred sanctuary of purposes of pacifying social discontent. Courtrooms of course designed to promote the illusion of solemn justice. If there was true justice why would such trappings be necessary? Wouldn't a table and chairs and an ordinary room serve just as well?
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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.
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Planning to write is not writing.
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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.
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Most people are quiet in the world, and live in it tentatively, as if it were not their own.
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And so do people pass out of one's life and all you can remember of them is their humanity, a poor fitful thing of no dominion, like your own.
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We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy.
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