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.

A new reader shouldn't be able to find you in your work, though someone who's read more may begin to.

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.

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.

One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing. I did that with 'World's Fair,' as with all of them. The inventions of the book come as discoveries.

People come out of the mid-west and go to the Ivy League. I kind of reversed the direction.

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.

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.

My father was the proprietor of a music shop on Forty-third Street, where many of the finest performers and musicians of the day would come to shop. He knew the classical repertoire inside out.

The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.

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 feel they will be damaged by progress, fair play and justice.

In fiction, you know, there are no borders. You can go anywhere.

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

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.

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 other was 'The U.S.A. Trilogy,' by John Dos Passos.

I've outlasted many marriages at Random House.

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

Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.

I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.

I got married very early, and in no time at all, we had three children. And it seemed to me I had an obligation to support them.

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.'

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

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.

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

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