Quotes by E. L. Doctorow

“So what this is is a road novel. Eventually entire civilization (in the South) had been uprooted and people found security only in movement, ... That interested me enormously ... A friend from New Orleans, he said when he read the book, This is like Hurricane Katrina.”

“He was a brilliant man, a complex man. The march justified him as a military man, but he had a great deal of guilt about it, and when the war was over he immediately left his troops and went down to do rescue-and-recovery operations. He wanted to rehabilitate the people hed been destroying and dispossessing.”

“Its glory is all moonshine.”

“You could go for miles without seeing an end to the procession of troops and horses and wagons, ... An eagle aloft in the April winds high over the landscape would only see something iridescently blue and side-winding that looked like the floodplain of a river.”

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

“You cant do that to Carl.”

“Not really, ... There is no Carl. I made him up.”

“It seemed to me so much more sensible to make something up than go through the tedious business of interviewing someone. I was just a kid and so maybe I was scared that no one would want to talk to me. And I figured that if there wasnt a Carl the doorman, there should have been.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; theres only narrative.”

“Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what youre doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.”

“The writer isnt made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.”

“You cant 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.”

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

“History is the present. Thats why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.”

If there is a religious agency in our lives, it has to appear in the manner of our times. Not from on high, but a revelation that hides itself in our culture, it will be ground-level, on the street, itll be coming down the avenue in the traffic, hard to tell apart from anything else.

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 its so easy to revise, I tended to stay on the same page. Ive learned to discipline myself.

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