E. L. Doctorow Quotes - Page 2

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.

Satire's nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time.

I have been everywhere because I don't know what I'm looking for.

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.

The theory of the teacher with all these immigrant kids was that if you spoke English loudly enough they would eventually understand.

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

The act of composition is a series of discoveries.

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.

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.

There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.

Children have a lot more to worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read.

I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything.

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.

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.

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.

Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.

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.

The voice of the Constitution is the inescapably solemn self-consciousness of the people giving the law unto themselves.

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

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.

Communists have no respect for people, only for positions.

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.

Poems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images.