A period of time is as much an organising principle for a work of fiction as a sense of place. You can do geography, as Faulkner did, or you can dwell on a particular period. It provides the same framework. — 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 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… — E. L. Doctorow Copy Share
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
