E.L. Doctorow: Likeness

E.L. Doctorow was novelist, editor, professor. Explore interesting quotes on likeness.

E.L. Doctorow: 50 quotes2 likes

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

E.L. Doctorow

On his writing style
Interview in Writers at Work (1988)
Variant: Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
Source: Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews

“Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.”

E.L. Doctorow

International Herald Tribune (1 October 1990)

“The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.”

E.L. Doctorow

Time (26 June 2006)

“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 Bathgate

Billy Bathgate (1989), Ch. 16