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Writing Quotes by E L Doctorow
- What we call fiction is the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies....Fiction is democratic, it reasserts the authority…
- The act of composition is a series of discoveries.
- I've known several cases of writers who decide to write about something and they research the hell out of it and when they're ready to…
- 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 is…
- Planning to write is not writing.
- 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 through…
- Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.
- Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
- Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
- Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
- Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at…
- Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip…
- Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing.
- A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.
- I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.
- History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.
- Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.
- One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of…
More Writing Quotes
- Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. — Hannah Arendt
- Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing. — Paul Auster
- I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was… — Paul Auster
- I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then… — Paul Auster
- When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfarthers of Blair and little Bush… — Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
- A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit. — Richard Bach
- In every song I write, whether it's a love song or a political song or a song about family, the one thing… — Billie Joe Armstrong
- I grew up in a working-class family, so I guess you could say I write from what I know. — Andrea Arnold
- Writing comes more easily if you have something to say. — Sholem Asch
- Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core… — Isaac Asimov
- If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster. — Isaac Asimov
- Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not. — Isaac Asimov