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.

Recently, I was in Bernalda, my dad's ancestral home town in Italy. He has just refurbished a palazzo and turned it into a hotel, so we had my sister's wedding there. It was beautiful.

The American people need no course in philosophy or political science of church history to know that God should not be made into a celestial party chairman.

In a small spacecraft, it was hard for the other two guys to sleep when the on-duty man was talking to Mission Control regularly.