L. Doctorow Quotations

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

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.

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.

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.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

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

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.

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

So what this is is a 'road novel.' Eventually entire civilization (in the South) had been uprooted and people found security only in movement, ... That interested me enormously ... A friend from New Orleans, he said when he read the book, 'This is like Hurricane Katrina.'

You could go for miles without seeing an end to the procession of troops and horses and wagons, ... An eagle aloft in the April winds high over the landscape would only see something iridescently blue and side-winding that looked like the floodplain of a river.