Well, it can be anything. It can be a voice, an image; it can be a deep moment of personal desperation. For instance, with Ragtime I was so desperate to write something, I was facing the wall of my study in my house in New Rochelle and so I started to write about the wall. That’s the kind of day we sometimes have, as writers. Then I wrote about the house that was attached to the wall. It was built in 1906, you see, so I thought about the era and what Broadview Avenue looked like then: trolley cars ran along the avenue down at the bottom of the hill; people wore white clothes in the summer to stay cool. Teddy Roosevelt was President. One thing led to another and that’s the way that book began, through desperation to those few images.—E. L. Doctorow

Photo of E. L. Doctorow by Mark Sobzcak. August 8, 2008, via Wikipedia Commons.

• Read a brief interview with E. L. Doctorow in New York magazine in which he says a bit more about how he wrote Ragtime. In this interview he discusses his intuitive way of working and says that while writing a book, the information that he needs comes to him. In fact, sometimes he literally bumps into it. Pretty cool!
• This quote comes from a 1986 Paris Review interview with E. L. Doctorow that took place in the auditorium at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. Read the complete interview.
• More than twenty years later, Doctorow was again interviewed at the 92nd Street Y. In this video of his April 29, 2009 talk with Roger Rosenblatt, Doctorow is funny and charming. He talks about his early development as a writer and reads from his book Homer and Langley. (8 min. 58 seconds)

• Learn more about E. L. Doctorow here.
• Buy Ragtime here.
• Buy Homer and Langley here.

See more quotes about writing here.