"Satire's nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth."
- E.L. Doctorow
"Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours."
"Poems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images."
"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."
"Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing."
"I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them."
"A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins."
"The marriage seemed to flourish on Father’s extended absences. ” Ragtime"
"Somehow he had catapulted himself beyond the world's value system. But this very fact lay upon him an awesome responsibility to maintain the illusions of other men."
"The literary experience extends impression into discourse. It flowers to thought with nouns, verbs, objects. It thinks. Film implodes discourse, it deliterates thought, it shrinks it to the compacted ..."