E. L. Doctorow Quotes

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

Well, I suppose I'm interested in ways of storytelling and in stories that are about storytelling.

You can only really get to any truth by telling peoples' stories.

There's a problem with narratives. Most that spring to mind are fictional.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

In my mind, there's not a great difference between what people call fiction and non-fiction. So in that sense, I'm like an early-18th-century person. I actually believe there's one way of writing.

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million, ... but they are, singly, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher.

You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.

Nothing, except the weather report or a general maxim of conduct, is so unsafe to rely upon as a theory of fiction.

There is a document in every novel in the world. Even in the most fantastic novel, even in science fiction, there is a documentary side. But, this side is not the crux of the matter.

Plot is a literary convention. Story is a force of nature.

there are elements of truth in all great fiction

I always had a hard time with fiction. It does feel like driving a car in a clown suit. You're going somewhere, but you're in costume, and you're not really fooling anybody. You're the guy in costume, and everybody's supposed to forget that and go along with you. Obviously, it can work, it works all the time - well, it doesn't always work. Still, no matter what, I'm always looking at the form and addressing it, not ignoring it.

I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.

Fact and fiction are different truths.

As I keep saying, fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was.

There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can't experience in real life. So I think there is a sense in which fiction can rescue history from confusion.

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

Every story we remember is a novel. Novels make things more universal.

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

He says every story has at least some truth in it, even if most are made up.

All stories are true," Skarpi said. "But this one really happened, if that's what you mean.

All stories are true.