E. L. Doctorow Zitate – Sprüche auf Englisch mit Übersetzung

Zitat des Tages von 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.

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

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

E. L. Doctorow

Each book tends to have its own identity rather than the author's. It speaks from itself rather than you. Each book is unlike the others because you are not bringing the same voice to every book. I think that keeps you alive as a writer.

E. L. Doctorow

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

E. L. Doctorow

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

E. L. Doctorow

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

My theory about why Hemingway killed himself is that he heard his own voice; that he reached the point where he couldn't write without feeling he was repeating himself. That's the worst thing that can happen to a writer.

E. L. Doctorow

I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech.

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.

E. L. Doctorow

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

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.

E. L. Doctorow

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

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

E. L. Doctorow

When you're working well, you don't do research. Whatever you need comes to you.

E. L. Doctorow

If we ever find out how the brain works, with all its complexity, then we will be able to build a machine that has consciousness. And if that happens, that is a road to planetary disaster because everything we've thought about ourselves, since the Bronze Age, the Bible, all of that will be gone.

E. L. Doctorow

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

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

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.

E. L. Doctorow

Here's how it goes: I'm up at the stroke of 10 or 10:30. I have breakfast and read the papers, and then it's lunchtime. Then maybe a little nap after lunch and out to the gym, and before I know it, it's time to have a drink.

E. L. Doctorow

To have the regard of one's peers is immensely moving.

E. L. Doctorow

I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist.

E. L. Doctorow

From my undergraduate days, I've always been interested in the major philosophical questions that don't seem to have an answer that everyone agrees on.

E. L. Doctorow

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

E. L. Doctorow

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

E. L. Doctorow

Congress is so beholden to the money that any solution in the general interest will be frustrated and subverted by the corporate interests who feel they will be damaged by progress, fair play and justice.

E. L. Doctorow

Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.

E. L. Doctorow

Movies are too literal.

E. L. Doctorow

When you're writing a book, you don't really think about it critically. You don't want to know too well what you're doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it.

E. L. Doctorow

I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.

E. L. Doctorow

I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries just the way the reader does, so you're simultaneously the writer and the reader.

E. L. Doctorow

I've outlasted many marriages at Random House.

E. L. Doctorow

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

E. L. Doctorow

A period of time is as much an organising principle for a work of fiction as a sense of place. You can do geography, as Faulkner did, or you can dwell on a particular period. It provides the same framework.

E. L. Doctorow

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.'

E. L. Doctorow

It seems to me that in literature, books have always been answers to other books.

E. L. Doctorow