American - Author | January 6, 1931 - July 21, 2015
Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.
E. L. Doctorow
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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.
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The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.
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Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
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We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy.
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Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
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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.
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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.
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