Quotes from E.L. Doctorow
It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
—E.L. Doctorow
[Theodore] Dreiser wrote this magnificent novel [Sister Carrie].… But the publisher… didn't like it, they were afraid of it. So they buried it. And naturally it did nothing; I think it sold four copies.… Dreiser rented a furnished room in Brooklyn. He put a chair in the middle of this room and sat in it. The chair didn't seem to be in the right position so he turned it a few degrees, and he sat in it again. Still it was not right. He kept turning the chair around and around, trying to align it to what—trying to correct his own relation to the universe? He never could do it, so he kept going around in circles and circles. He did that for quite a while, and ended up in a sanatorium.
—E.L. Doctorow