E. L. Doctorow Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”