E. L. Doctorow

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

History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining ...researching ...talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.

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.

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

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