Top 59 Quotes by E. L. Doctorow

I can walk into a bookstore and hand over my credit card and they don't know who the hell I am. Maybe that says something about bookstore clerks.

I've outlasted many marriages at Random House.

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

Things that appear on the front page of the newspaper as 'fact' are far more dangerous than the games played by a novelist, and can lead to wars.

I'm not the sort of writer who can walk into a party and take a look around, see who's sleeping with whom and go home and write a novel about society. It's not the way I work.

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

One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing.

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.

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.

My books start almost before I realise it. Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now.'