E. L. Doctorow

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.

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

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

I write about the men you want to read about but don't necessarily want to be married to.

In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life.

As a young child my attention span was, as I remember it, rather short.