E. L. Doctorow Quotes

I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes.

I want you, as a reader, to experience what I experience, to let that other world, that imaginary world that I have created, tell you things about the real world.

Well-written novels make you more empathetic towards other people. You can identify with someone who isn't you. You can change your identity. A 14-year-old boy can become Anna Karenina. It is a miracle.

We all have a lot of people inside us, yet we get to live only one life. Fiction lets us slip into someone else’s skin, so to speak. That’s why we read novels, and also why we write them - to experience more life, through imagination.

Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.

When the reader hears strong echoes of his or her own life and beliefs, he or she is apt to become more invested in the story.

This is what I love about novels - both reading them and writing them. They jump into the abyss to be with you where you are.

A book can just be a description of a stick being snapped in half. If the reader is brought to feel the plight of the stick, well, you can imagine what that would be like.

I think fiction allows you to inhabit new domains and it's you, the reader living in that domain for a few days that results in a deeper understanding as opposed to the novel proclaiming this is what it is right and this is what is wrong.

I'm completely indifferent to what genre I read provided that I feel sympathy with how a writer perceives being alive in the world.

I want all my books to provoke some kind of response in the reader, to make them think something or feel something or both, and for that to become a part of them and work into their own lives.

Often, if I read a story and I'm moved, I have an understanding for a character and I don't really know why.

I can't consciously explain how people feel after reading my books. All is too personal.

When I was growing up, a lot of books affected me, but I never wrote letters to the author or anything like that. I'm always mindful that there are probably a whole bunch of people reading my books like that, too.

American readers are so polite; their reactions make it seem like I've received thousands of thank-you notes. It's just lovely, and amazing the things people tell you that have touched them and related to their own lives.

The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.

The joy of great fiction is that it transports the reader to another world, where new characters live in otherwise unimaginable ways. It is one of the most powerful ways of generating empathy that I know.

I think you're always drawn to what you love, and I'm always really drawn to things that feel really real and really true to me. I love things that make me think of things in a way I hadn't, and I love looking at people in the world in a way that I hadn't. And sometimes big, huge stories do that for me, but I think I am drawn to smaller ones.

That's the power of fiction, that it can take the collective and make it personal.

If a reader comes across a story that makes them cry, you can be sure that the writer felt every single thing that makes the reader cry.

The great thing about fiction is you can talk about things without being didactic about them, but hopefully forge a connection with people and an understanding about a shared humanity that tells its own story.

This is the beauty of fiction. We may not like these characters, but we inhabit them.

When I read, I don't need a character to look like me, act like me, or think like me. I don't need to have my heart broken. I don't need to be surprised or amused or challenged, and I don't need to swoon.

We write songs that hit different people at different ages where they live.

I think 'Beasts of No Nation' is a novel that hopefully will affect each person who reads it in a different way.