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…

— E. L. Doctorow

There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. Awake, I am in a continuum with my…

— E. L. Doctorow

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

— E. L. Doctorow

It is the immigrant hordes who keep this country alive, the waves of them arriving year after year.... Who believes in America…

— E. L. Doctorow

A book begins as a private excitement of the mind.

— E. L. Doctorow

I started on computers with 'Billy Bathgate,' a little orange screen with black letters. I thought it was really cool, but it…

— E. L. Doctorow

When I'm writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way…

— E. L. Doctorow

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

— E. L. Doctorow

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

— E. L. Doctorow

Uncharged with invisible meaning, the visible is nothing, mere clay; and without visible circumstance, a territory, to connect to, our spirit is…

— E. L. Doctorow

“Writing a novel is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you…

— E. L. Doctorow

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

— E. L. Doctorow

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

— E. L. Doctorow

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

A writer's life is so hazardous that anything he does is bad for him. Anything that happens to him is bad: failure's…

— E. L. Doctorow

It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that…

— E. L. Doctorow

Congress is so beholden to the money that any solution in the general interest will be frustrated and subverted by the corporate…

— E. L. Doctorow

It may be that the most avid readers of new fiction in America today are film producers, an indication of the trouble…

— E. L. Doctorow

Movies are too literal.

— E. L. Doctorow

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

A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.

— E. L. Doctorow

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make…

— E. L. Doctorow

“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader, not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained…

— E. L. Doctorow

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…

— E. L. Doctorow

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