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You can’t remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again.

— E. L. Doctorow Billy Bathgate (1989)

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More quotes by E. L. Doctorow

There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.

Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining ...researching ...talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: E. L. Doctorow (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.