What we call fiction is the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies....Fiction is democratic, it reasserts the authority of the single mind to make and remake the world.
E. L. DoctorowI am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them.
E. L. DoctorowIt proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.
E. L. DoctorowThe three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.
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. 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. Doctorow