E. L. Doctorow

“When was the moment, I don’t know when, with all my remembrances I can’t find it; maybe it was during our dance, or maybe it was some morning as a breeze of air shook the sun’s light; maybe it was one of those nights of hugging when we reached our ripeness and the earth turned past it; maybe we were asleep. Really how life gets on is a secret, you only know your memory, and it makes its own time. The real time leads you along and you never know when it happens, the best that can be is come and gone.”

“It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.”

“Planning to write is not writing. Outlining ...researching ...talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.”

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

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

“The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.”

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”

“It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

“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.”

“I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.”

“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.”

“Satire's nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.”