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
Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction. — E. L. Doctorow Copy Share Image
A period of time is as much an organising principle for a work of fiction as a sense of place. You can… — E. L. Doctorow Copy Share Image
The important thing is not to be too comfortable when you're writing. Noise in the street? That's good. The computer goes down?… — E. L. Doctorow Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 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
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
