“It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
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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 21-31 of 31
“It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
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“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.”
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“People come out of the mid-west and go to the Ivy League. I kind of reversed the direction.”
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“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 k...”
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“Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.”
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“I discovered Einstein said the same thing about his celebrated theories of relativity that writers say about their work when he said he didn't have any feelings of personal possession of the...”
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“I started on computers with 'Billy Bathgate,' a little orange screen with black letters. I thought it was really cool, but it actually slowed me up for a while because it's so easy to revise...”
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“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”
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“There are two books that impressed me when I was very young. One was 'The Adventures of Augie March' - the idea of having something so generous, and so adventurous and improvisatory. The oth...”
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“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.”
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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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