E. L. Doctorow Quotes

I developed a mania for Fitzgerald - by the time I'd graduated from high school I'd read everything he'd written. I started with 'The Great Gatsby' and moved on to 'Tender Is the Night,' which just swept me away. Then I read 'This Side of Paradise,' his novel about Princeton - I literally slept with that book under my pillow for two years.

I was a good college kid, all-American and baseball-playing, living in the dorms with a million barbarians. I did not expect to be claimed by Fitzgerald hook, line, and sinker. 'This Side of Paradise' - that sweet, sophomoric pastiche of notes, scenes, poetry, and plays - I felt like he'd written the book just for me.

Does everything in this life begin and end with Judy Blume? Perhaps.

I'm a big John Steinbeck fan. Cormac McCarthy. I've always loved the stories of regular people. Mark Twain, too. When you look back at some of the epic writers of our country's history, very rarely do you find upper-class royalty. We seem to delve into the struggle of life and the labor of life much more frequently.

'Moby-Dick' really threw me. I read it when I was 14 and my best friends were books. It changed the way I looked at the world.

I can only remember two books from college that moved me: E.M. Forster's 'Howards End' and F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby.'

'Five Easy Pieces' got to me pretty good. I remember seeing it and thinking, 'That is so cool. I would love to be able to do that.'

Since 'Huckleberry Finn,' or thereabouts, it seemed that all American literature was about the alienated hero.

I read a lot when I was young. All the obvious, all the greats, from 'Le Grand Meaulnes,' 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' 'Fear and Loathing,' 'Catcher in the Rye,' 'The Bell Jar,' 'The Female Eunuch,' 'Valley of the Dolls,' 'The Feminine Mystique,' Tom Wolfe. Then, film took over for me. Film was so exciting in the '70s.

I read Gide's 'The Immoralist' over and over as a teenager. I was obsessed with it. It's written with such simplicity and dread, and the desert, the shabby colonial world, is brought right into your consciousness without being over-explained.

The Great Gatsby' [...] was my 'Tom Sawyer' when I was twelve [....]

I have always just experimented, and I come from a very ancient, acoustic root. It was very hard to put a finger on me.

My parents were willing to let me follow my nose, do what I wanted to do, and they supported my interest by buying the books that I wanted for birthdays and Christmas, almost always poetry books.

From a plot perspective, what I finally found for my touchstone was that I consider 'Upside' to be a loose telling of Jane Austen's 'Emma,' or 'Clueless.'

I like books that explore identity and youth culture or rites of passage.

For me personally, my favourite part of performing is just going in the crowd and doing crazy things that they never expected to see. Challenging myself to do new things that I never expected to do. That's the biggest thing for me.

Growing up, I had a bit of an identity crisis.

I think that every human - and this is something, you know, like, your years from 14 to, like, 23 are kind of, like, super, super existential, and you're figuring out life.

I started writing my first book for young people when I was in college. I was only a couple of years out of my teens when I began; I felt closer to that experience than I did as an adult. But I've always been drawn to stories about young people.

I absolutely loved improv! I felt very much at home being onstage. It freed me to be all sorts of people other than myself. It was an escape from myself, if you will. I still love that creative freedom of improv and making people laugh.

I've realized that I will probably write about teenagers and that time in people's lives - I'll probably come back to it a lot.

Like many kids, I wanted to do my own thing so it wasn't until around the end of high school and start of college that I started to develop my own faith.

I write from the perspective of an early 20s kid who is trying to grasp an idea of what the hell is going on.

New York was the Promised Land growing up. Writers were gods! The great gods of American culture... I thought.

When I was between 18 and 25 it was like I had problem finding the middle of my personality.