E. L. Doctorow
History based known novels of American writer Edgar Laurence Doctorow. His works of fiction include Homer & Langley, The March, Billy Bathgate, Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, City of God, Welcome to Hard Times, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, The Waterworks, and All the Time in the World. Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle Awards, two PEN Faulkner Awards, The Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. In 2009 he was short listed for the Man Booker International Prize honoring a writer’s lifetime achievement in fiction, and in 2012 he won the PEN Saul Bellow Award given to an author whose “scale of achievement over a sustained career places him in the highest rank of American Literature.” In 2013 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Gold Medal for Fiction.
“God has raised his hand to give us respite. It could be he has something more in mind for us. With this time on our hands, we should try to figure out what it could be. Because HE don't do pointless acts of charity.”
“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.”
“I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.”
“And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.”
“Langley would never complete his newspaper project. I knew that and I'm sure he knew it as well. It was a crazy foolish hand-rubbing scheme that kept his mind in the mood he liked to be in.”
“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.”