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.… — E. L. Doctorow Copy Share Image
I don't think anything I've written has been done in under six or eight drafts. Usually it takes me a few years… — E. L. Doctorow Copy Share Image
A writer of books has to admit that film is the enemy, and that in my case I have been sleeping with… — E. L. Doctorow Copy Share Image
One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in… — E. L. Doctorow Copy Share Image
My books start almost before I realise it. Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface… — E. L. Doctorow Copy Share Image
I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen… — E. L. Doctorow Copy Share Image
Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of… — E. L. Doctorow Copy Share Image
Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction. — E. L. Doctorow Copy Share Image
My sense of what a book should be has changed so radically. I like to think for the better. — E. L. Doctorow Copy Share Image
Each book tends to have its own identity rather than the author's. It speaks from itself rather than you. Each book is… — E. L. Doctorow Copy Share Image
Children have a lot more to worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read. — E. L. Doctorow Copy Share Image
Things that appear on the front page of the newspaper as 'fact' are far more dangerous than the games played by a novelist, and… — E. L. Doctorow Copy Share Image
There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I… — E. L. Doctorow Copy Share Image
Most people are quiet in the world, and live in it tentatively, as if it were not their own. — E. L. Doctorow Copy Share Image
It is the immigrant hordes who keep this country alive, the waves of them arriving year after year.... Who believes in America more than… — E. L. Doctorow Copy Share Image
I started on computers with 'Billy Bathgate,' a little orange screen with black letters. I thought it was really cool, but it actually slowed… — E. L. Doctorow Copy Share Image
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… — E. L. Doctorow Copy Share Image
Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction. — E. L. Doctorow Copy Share Image
Uncharged with invisible meaning, the visible is nothing, mere clay; and without visible circumstance, a territory, to connect to, our spirit is shapeless, nameless,… — E. L. Doctorow Copy Share Image
“Writing a novel is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make… — E. L. Doctorow Copy Share Image
I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority. — E. L. Doctorow Copy Share Image
