“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.”
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E.L. Doctorow 25
novelist, editor, professor 1931–2015Related quotes

“If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!”

“Get books, sit yourself down anywhere, and go to reading them yourself.”

Autobiographical Recollections of C. R. Leslie with Selections from his correspondence Ed. Tom Taylor , Ticknor & Fields, Boston 1860
Penguins and Golden Calves (2003)
Context: I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour — write, write, write.

On the relentlessly brutal tone of the works of screenwriter Cormac McCarthy
New York Times interview (2013)
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Source: Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

On how he became a writer in “An Interview with Dany Laferrière” https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/an-interview-with-dany-laferriere-jessie-chaffee (WWB Daily, 2016)

As quoted in "The Michener Phenomenon" by Caryn James in The New York Times (8 September 1985)