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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Write
Headlights
Night
Researching
Whole
Fog
Writing
Trip
Way
Planning
Driving
Make
None
Like
Talking
Outlining
People

More quotes by E. L. Doctorow

Image
Children have a lot more to worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
I've always felt, as a writer, that radicals are fascinating because they're relations, they have a place in the American family. They're the relatives everyone wishes would go away. They're the embarrassments to decorum and good taste.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
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.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
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.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
The music of the Stones pounds the air like the amplified pulse of my erection.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
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.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
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.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
A new reader shouldn't be able to find you in your work, though someone who's read more may begin to.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
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.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
All over the world today, not just in the totalitarian countries, assiduous functionaries in Ministries of Truth are clubbing history dumb and rendering language insensible.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
A writer of books has to admit that film is the enemy, and that in my case I have been sleeping with the enemy.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
So that individuation may be compared to a pyramid in that it is only achieved by the placement of the top stone… The Jews, Ford said. They ain't like anyone else I know. There goes you theory up shits creek. He smiled.
E. L. Doctorow
Image
What we call fiction is the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies....Fiction is democratic, it reasserts the authority of the single mind to make and remake the world.
E. L. Doctorow