E. L. Doctorow Quotes

I've never set out to seduce my reader. I don't see him at all clearly.

I can only try to keep the characters interesting; it's up to the readers to decide whether they're still relevant.

Naturally, the reader has access only to the events I show and the way I show them, but as has been said, there's generally a good deal of ambiguity in that presentation.

If there is no love between the author and the story, there is no love between the reader and the story.

I get thousands of letters, and they give me a feeling of how each book is perceived. Often I think I have written about a certain theme, but by reading the letters or reviews, I realise that everybody sees the book differently.

Gone are the days when a publisher could take out an ad, count on a few reviews, and have an author do a couple of signings. Nowadays, readers want to feel a connection with an author.

I'm here to get the story on to the page. It would be good to catch your attention, and I have to make you want to read on, and I suppose I prefer you don't actually think about the 'how' at all - the writing technique, the 'style', or even who it is that's putting this together.

It's a dead give away of an inexperienced writer if every character speaks with the same voice.

I have realised just how important it is to readers to feel that fictional stories are based on reality.

When I'm writing, I try to have the mask of my character on as I'm walking through the world.

If a translation doesn't have obvious writing problems, it may seem quite all right at first glance. We readers, after all, quickly adapt to the style of a translator, stop noticing it, and get caught up in the story.

The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters.

I have always tended toward a lush prose style, but I take care to modulate it from story to story and to strip it down entirely when necessary.

Well, in features, and in writing especially, it's often the style of the writer comes in.

You can't visit readers where you think they are. You have to invite them home to where you are and try to lure them into your universe. That's the art of storytelling.

The things I write are for those who are willing to accept a new relationship between the reader and the author.

Well see, I'm a good enough writer that not everybody in my books talks exactly like I do.

Like, even when I speak, I think I speak the same way I write. I kind of see it a certain way, and it leads me to write it exactly how I'm seeing it.

Whenever I write, I'm always thinking of the reader.

It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience).

I think that a classic style in writing tends to remove the reader one level from the immediacy of the experience. For any normal reader, I think a colloquial style makes him feel more as though he is within the action, instead of just reading about it.

I understand that when people read my books that there's something there - but I don't identify with it.

If I've vividly laid out the narrative, the reader will come to his own conclusions.

In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.

Novelisation doesn't imply the truth. Readers are sophisticated enough to know that.