Quote

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing - none of that is writing. Writing is writing. Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

E. L. Doctorow

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E. L. Doctorow
Age: 84 †
Born: 1931
Born: January 6
Died: 2015
Died: July 21
Author
Essayist
Faculty Member
Novelist
Playwright
Professor
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Edgar Laurence Doctorow
Edgar Lawrence Doctorow
Whole
Fog
Writing
Trip
Way
Planning
Make
Driving
Like
None
People
Talking
Outlining
Write
Headlights
Night
Researching

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If you feel a bump on page one hundred, it may be you went off on page fifty.
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Whenever citizens are seen routinely as enemies of their own government, writers are rountinely seen to be the most dangerous enemies.
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Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
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And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.
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We are able to walk on air, but only as long as our illusion supports us.
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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.
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A new reader shouldn't be able to find you in your work, though someone who's read more may begin to.
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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.
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And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.
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When I'm writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences.
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I worry about images. Images are what things mean.
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The music of the Stones pounds the air like the amplified pulse of my erection.
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We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy.
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Because like all whores you value propriety. You are creature of capitalism, the ethics of which are so totally corrupt and hypocritical that your beauty is no more than the beauty of gold, which is to say false and cold and useless.
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Leo Crowley, Harry [Truman]'s Foreign Economic Administrator, tells Congressmen the theory...: 'If you create good governments in foreign countries, automatically you will have better markets for ourselves.' With that honeycunt staring you in the face, you'd forget your grammar too.
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We dress them [children] in the presumptions of the world. They are the bright small face of hope. They are the last belief we have, the belief in making them believe.
E. L. Doctorow
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The act of composition is a series of discoveries.
E. L. Doctorow
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Dad is always hiding in his book.
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I lived in New York for a couple months. It seemed to me at first an incredibly clean place with well-dressed people and washed cars and bright-painted red-and-yellow streetcars and white buildings.
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Time seems to me a drift, a shifting of sand. And my mind is shifting with it. I am wearing away.
E. L. Doctorow