Quotes from E. L. Doctorow

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Had he said anything but what he said, had I been given the chance to change my mind, had he told me how much I was needed, had he tried to convince me that there was some attestable humanity in all of this, I would have stayed.

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.

You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can see the whole trip that way.

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.

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.

Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.

The theory of the teacher with all these immigrant kids was that if you spoke English loudly enough they would eventually understand.

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

I've outlasted many marriages at Random House.

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.

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.

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

Anyone at any age is able to tell the story of his or her life with authority.

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

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 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.

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.

We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time.