More EL Doctorow

From the Paris Review's endlessly fascinating DNA of Literature feature, an excerpt from EL Doctorow's interview back in 1986.

INTERVIEWER
Isn’t there an enormous temptation as a fiction writer to take scenes out of history, since you do rely on that so much, and fiddle with them just a little bit?

DOCTOROW
Well, it’s nothing new, you know. I myself like the way Shakespeare fiddles with history. And Tolstoy. In this country we tend to be naive about history. We think it’s Newton’s perfect mechanical universe, out there predictably for everyone to see and set their watches by. But it’s more like curved space, and infinitely compressible and expandable time. It’s constant subatomic chaos. When President Reagan says the Nazi S.S. were as much victims as the Jews they murdered—wouldn’t you call that fiddling?

Sadly, only the excerpt is available right now. For many others, you can download full PDFs of the interviews.