Write Quotes by E. L. Doctorow

8 Write quotes by E. L. Doctorow

Doctorow’s eight brief comments reveal his knack for weaving history into narrative, offering a snapshot of how to make the past feel immediate. They’re useful for anyone wanting to blend fact and fiction without overcomplicating.

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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

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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

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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…

E. L. Doctorow

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Planning to write is not writing.

E. L. Doctorow

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My theory about why Hemingway killed himself is that he heard his own voice; that he reached the point where he couldn't…

E. L. Doctorow

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I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries…

E. L. Doctorow

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I discovered Einstein said the same thing about his celebrated theories of relativity that writers say about their work when he said…

E. L. Doctorow

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I'm not the sort of writer who can walk into a party and take a look around, see who's sleeping with whom…

E. L. Doctorow

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More by 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…

E. L. Doctorow

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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

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Most people are quiet in the world, and live in it tentatively, as if it were not their own.

E. L. Doctorow

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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

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A book begins as a private excitement of the mind.

E. L. Doctorow

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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

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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

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Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.

E. L. Doctorow

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The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.

E. L. Doctorow

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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

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“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

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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.

E. L. Doctorow

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I got married very early, and in no time at all, we had three children. And it seemed to me I had an obligation…

E. L. Doctorow

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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…

E. L. Doctorow

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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…

E. L. Doctorow

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