“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”
3 likes
Author detail
Edgar Lawrence Doctorow has received the National Book Award, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howell Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Humanities Medal. Doctorow was born in New York City on January 6, 1931, and attended the Bronx High School of Science. After graduating with honors from Kenyon College in 1952, he did graduate work at Columbia University and served in the U.S. Army, which stationed him in Germany. In 1954, he married Helen Setzer. They have three children. Doctorow was senior editor for New American Library from 1959 to 1964 and then served as editor in chief at Dial Press until 1969. Since then, he has devoted his time to writing and teaching. He holds the Glucksman Chair in American Letters at New York University and over the years has taught at several institutions, including Yale University Drama School, Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, and the University of California, Irvine.
Quotes
Showing 1-20 of 31
“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”
3 likes
“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.”
0 likes
“Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.”
0 likes
“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing.”
0 likes
“I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.”
0 likes
“A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.”
0 likes
“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.”
0 likes
“Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.”
0 likes
“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 pla...”
0 likes
“Washington is designed not to solve problems. Congress is so beholden to the money that any solution in the general interest will be frustrated and subverted by the corporate interests who f...”
0 likes
“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 be...”
0 likes
“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.”
0 likes
“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 w...”
0 likes
“I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.”
0 likes
“Suffering isn't a moral endowment. People don't always do well under duress, and it seemed to me to be truer to a fellow in that situation to make him angry.”
0 likes
“The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.”
0 likes
“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
0 likes
“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...”
0 likes
“I don't think anything I've written has been done in under six or eight drafts. Usually it takes me a few years to write a book. 'World's Fair' was an exception. It seemed to be a particular...”
0 likes
“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.”
0 likes