E. L. Doctorow quotes:

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.

In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state. It's become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.

Washington is designed not to solve problems. Congress is so beholden to the money that any solution in the general interest will be frustrated and subverted by the corporate interests who feel they will be damaged by progress, fair play and justice.

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 stake.

People come out of the mid-west and go to the Ivy League. I kind of reversed the direction.

Congress is so beholden to the money that any solution in the general interest will be frustrated and subverted by the corporate interests who feel they will be damaged by progress, fair play and justice.

The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.

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 write the book, then you find the justification for it.

I can walk into a bookstore and hand over my credit card and they don't know who the hell I am. Maybe that says something about bookstore clerks.

I don't think anything I've written has been done in under six or eight drafts. Usually it takes me a few years to write a book. 'World's Fair' was an exception. It seemed to be a particularly fluent book as it came. I did it in seven months. I think what happened in that case is that God gave me a bonus book.

My father was the proprietor of a music shop on Forty-third Street, where many of the finest performers and musicians of the day would come to shop. He knew the classical repertoire inside out.

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 writing to find out what I was writing.

Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.

Satire's nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.

Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.

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

Implications of treason are fed like cubes of sugar to the twelve-headed animal which is justice. In ... opening remarks. In the way questions are asked. In support of lines of questioning where cases of treason are cited and the Judge endorses the relevance of the citation.

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 the sentences.

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 writing to find out what I was writing. I did that with 'World's Fair,' as with all of them. The inventions of the book come as discoveries.

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

If we ever find out how the brain works, with all its complexity, then we will be able to build a machine that has consciousness. And if that happens, that is a road to planetary disaster because everything we've thought about ourselves, since the Bronze Age, the Bible, all of that will be gone.

I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.

Somewhere along the line the rhythms and tonalities of music elided in my brain with the sounds that words make and the rhythm that sentences have.

Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.

The important thing is not to be too comfortable when you're writing. Noise in the street? That's good. The computer goes down? That's good. All these things are good. It has to be a little bit of a struggle.

Implications of treason are fed like cubes of sugar to the twelve-headed animal which is justice. In ... opening remarks. In the way questions are asked. In support of lines of questioning where cases of treason are cited and the Judge endorses the relevance of the citation."

I discovered Einstein said the same thing about his celebrated theories of relativity that writers say about their work when he said he didn't have any feelings of personal possession of these ideas. Once they were out there, they came from somewhere else. And that's exactly the feeling when you write. You don't feel possessive about it.

My sense of what a book should be has changed so radically. I like to think for the better.

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

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 the relatives everyone wishes would go away. They're the embarrassments to decorum and good taste.

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 that way.

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing.

Leo Crowley, Harry [Truman]'s Foreign Economic Administrator, tells Congressmen the theory...: 'If you create good governments in foreign countries, automatically you will have better markets for ourselves.' With that honeycunt staring you in the face, you'd forget your grammar too.

There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.

Images break with a small ping, their destruction is as wonderful as their being, they are essentially instruments of torture exploding through the individual's calloused capacity to feel undifferentiated emotions full of longing and dissatisfaction and monumentality.

By the rules of evidence in this trial the verdict is foreordained. If the testimony ... is admitted as competent, the conspiracy is proved. Because it would not be admitted except under the assumption that a conspiracy existed.... Here ... a defendant can be found guilty of being brought to court as a defendant.

The theory for admitting accomplice testimony that is uncorroborated is that conspiracy is by its nature secretive and that only the parties to it can know it occurred. But in practice this means the accomplice's guilt is modified to the degree that he can convict the defendant.

And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus is that no one had ever been put to death in Socrates' name. And that is because Socrates' ideas were never made law. Law, in whatever name, protects privilege.

There are two books that impressed me when I was very young. One was 'The Adventures of Augie March' - the idea of having something so generous, and so adventurous and improvisatory. The other was 'The U.S.A. Trilogy,' by John Dos Passos.

Happiness consists of living in the dailyness of life and not knowing how happy you are.

The images of things are not the things in themselves.

It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.

I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them.

Because like all whores you value propriety. You are creature of capitalism, the ethics of which are so totally corrupt and hypocritical that your beauty is no more than the beauty of gold, which is to say false and cold and useless.

one day you stepped in snow, the next in mud, water soaked in your boots and froze them at night, it was the next worst thing to pure blizzardry, it was weather that wouldn't let you settle.

It is the law of wealth that such people only profit from the money that is taken from them.

Somehow he had catapulted himself beyond the world's value system. But this very fact lay upon him an awesome responsibility to maintain the illusions of other men.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

I started on computers with 'Billy Bathgate,' a little orange screen with black letters. I thought it was really cool, but it actually slowed me up for a while because it's so easy to revise, I tended to stay on the same page. I've learned to discipline myself.

We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy.

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

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries just the way the reader does, so you're simultaneously the writer and the reader.

Here's how it goes: I'm up at the stroke of 10 or 10:30. I have breakfast and read the papers, and then it's lunchtime. Then maybe a little nap after lunch and out to the gym, and before I know it, it's time to have a drink.

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page.

Suffering isn't a moral endowment. People don't always do well under duress, and it seemed to me to be truer to a fellow in that situation to make him angry.

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.

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

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.

I'm not the sort of writer who can walk into a party and take a look around, see who's sleeping with whom and go home and write a novel about society. It's not the way I work.

Things that appear on the front page of the newspaper as 'fact' are far more dangerous than the games played by a novelist, and can lead to wars.

My theory about why Hemingway killed himself is that he heard his own voice; that he reached the point where he couldn't write without feeling he was repeating himself. That's the worst thing that can happen to a writer.

In fiction, you know, there are no borders. You can go anywhere.

I have a number of vices, one of which is moderation.

There is really no fiction or non-fiction; there is only narrative. One mode of perception has no greater claim on the truth than the other; that the distance has perhaps to do with distance - narrative distance - from the characters; it has to do with the kind of voice that is talking, but it certainly hasn't to do with the common distribution between fact and imagination.

You can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again.

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

The poem is a cry of the unborn heart. Yes, because the poem perfectly embodies the world, there is no world without poem.

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

The act of composition is a series of discoveries.

Planning to write is not writing.

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 of the single mind to make and remake the world.

A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.

It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.

I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.

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

And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.

If you feel a bump on page one hundred, it may be you went off on page fifty.

Poems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images.

And so do people pass out of one's life and all you can remember of them is their humanity, a poor fitful thing of no dominion, like your own.

The Shadow had no imagination. He neither looked at naked women nor thought of ridding the world of dictators like Hitler or Mussolini.

We dress them [children] in the presumptions of the world. They are the bright small face of hope. They are the last belief we have, the belief in making them believe.

Communists have no respect for people, only for positions.

I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech.

We are all good friends. Friendship is what endures. Shared ideals, respect for the whole character of a human being.

There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.

Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.

Time seems to me a drift, a shifting of sand. And my mind is shifting with it. I am wearing away.

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 bad; impoverishment is bad, money is very, very bad. Nothing good can happen... Except the act of writing.

My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.

The music of the Stones pounds the air like the amplified pulse of my erection.

Dad is always hiding in his book.

A writer of books has to admit that film is the enemy, and that in my case I have been sleeping with the enemy.

It is the immigrant hordes who keep this country alive, the waves of them arriving year after year.... Who believes in America more than the people who run down the gangplank and kiss the ground?

When you're working well, you don't do research. Whatever you need comes to you.

A book begins as a private excitement of the mind.

I have committed many sins in my life. This precise sin-the sin against poets-is without absolution.

I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything.

Whenever citizens are seen routinely as enemies of their own government, writers are rountinely seen to be the most dangerous enemies.

I worry about images. Images are what things mean.

I have been everywhere because I don't know what I'm looking for.

An Animated Cartoon Theology: 1. People are animals. 2. The body is mortal and subject to incredible pain. 3. Life is antagonistic to the living. 4. The flesh can be sawed, crushed, frozen, stretched, burned, bombed, and plucked for music. 5. The dumb are abused by the smart and the smart destroyed by their own cunning. 6. The small are tortured by the large and the large destroyed by their own momentum. 7. We are able to walk on air, but only as long as our illusion supports us.

Children have a lot more to worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read.

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 writing to find out what I was writing. I did that with 'World's Fair' as with all of them. The inventions of the book come as discoveries.

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. Sometimes you run over a drunk who's lain down and fallen asleep on the warm pavement. I mean, do you keep going, or what?

We are able to walk on air, but only as long as our illusion supports us.

A new reader shouldn't be able to find you in your work, though someone who's read more may begin to.

Movies are too literal.

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 write, they can't move because they are so burdened. I start writing. Whatever I need somehow comes to hand.

Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.

Banks and churches and courtrooms all depend on the appurtenances of theatre. On illusion. Banks, the illusion of stability and honourable dealings to the rot and corruption of capitalist exploitation. Churches the illusion of sacred sanctuary of purposes of pacifying social discontent. Courtrooms of course designed to promote the illusion of solemn justice. If there was true justice why would such trappings be necessary? Wouldn't a table and chairs and an ordinary room serve just as well?

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 memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.