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. – E. L. Doctorow
Obama is a great man who’s just beginning to understand the realities. And I’m not just saying that because he reads my books. I would have voted for him anyway. – E. L. Doctorow
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. – E. L. Doctorow
I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority. – E. L. Doctorow
There are two books that impressed me when I was very young. One was ‘The Adventures of Augie March’ – the idea of having something so generous, and so adventurous and improvisatory. The other was ‘The U.S.A. Trilogy,’ by John Dos Passos. – E. L. Doctorow
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. – E. L. Doctorow
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
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
I’m not the sort of writer who can walk into a party and take a look around, see who’s sleeping with whom and go home and write a novel about society. It’s not the way I work. – E. L. Doctorow
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. – E. L. Doctorow
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. – E. L. Doctorow
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
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
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
The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like. – E. L. Doctorow
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
The important thing is not to be too comfortable when you’re writing. Noise in the street? That’s good. The computer goes down? That’s good. All these things are good. It has to be a little bit of a struggle. – E. L. Doctorow
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. – E. L. Doctorow
Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing. – E. L. Doctorow
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
Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction. – E. L. Doctorow
From my undergraduate days, I’ve always been interested in the major philosophical questions that don’t seem to have an answer that everyone agrees on. – E. L. Doctorow
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
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
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
