Quotes from 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 interests who feel they will be damaged by progress, fair play and justice.

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.

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.

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

From my undergraduate days, I've always been interested in the major philosophical questions that don't seem to have an answer that everyone agrees on.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.

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.

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.

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?

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

Movies are too literal.

It seems to me that in literature, books have always been answers to other books.

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