“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”E.L. Doctorow
“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.”E.L. Doctorow Interview in Writers at Work (1988)
“You can’t remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again.”E.L. Doctorow book Billy BathgateBilly Bathgate (1989), Ch. 16