I like commas. I detest semi-colons โ I donโt think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didnโt need them, they were fly-specks on the page.
E. L. DoctorowThere is really no fiction or non-fiction; there is only narrative. One mode of perception has no greater claim on the truth than the other; that the distance has perhaps to do with distance - narrative distance - from the characters; it has to do with the kind of voice that is talking, but it certainly hasn't to do with the common distribution between fact and imagination.
E. L. DoctorowA new reader shouldn't be able to find you in your work, though someone who's read more may begin to.
E. L. DoctorowLike art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.
E. L. DoctorowWhen I'm writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences.
E. L. DoctorowYou 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