Another advantage of those voiced intrusions is to provide a kind of beat or a caesura in the ongoing narrative.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have any idea how a project is going to end?

DOCTOROW:Not at that point, no. It’s not a terribly rational way to work.It’s hard to explain. I have found one explanation that seems to satisfy people. I tell them it’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

[...] I subscribe to what Henry James tries to indicate when he gives that wonderful example of a young woman who has led a sheltered life walking along beside an army barracks and hearing a snatch of soldier’s conversation coming through the window. On the basis of that, said James, if she’s a novelist she’s capable of going home and writing a perfectly accurate novel about army life. I’ve always subscribed to that idea. We're supposed to be able to get into other skins. We're supposed to be able to render experiences not our own and warrant times and places we haven’t seen. That’s one justification for art, isn’t it—to distribute the suffering? Writing teachers invariably tell students, Write about what you know. That’s, of course, what you have to do, but on the other hand, how do you know what you know until you’ve written it? Writing is knowing. What did Kafka know? The insurance business? So that kind of advice is foolish, because it presumes that you have to go out to a war to be able to do war. Well, some do and some don’t. I’ve had very little experience in my life. In fact, I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.

DOCTOROW: A writer’s life is so hazardous that anything he does is bad for him. Anything that happens to him is bad: failure’s bad, success is bad; impoverishment is bad, money is very, very bad. Nothing good can happen.

INTERVIEWER: Except the act of writing itself.

DOCTOROW: Except the act of writing. So if he shoots birds and animals and anything else he can find, you’ve got to give him that. And if he/she drinks, you give him/her that too, unless the work is affected. For all of us, there’s an intimate connection between the struggle to write and the ability to survive on a daily basis as a human being. So we have a high rate of self-destruction. Do we mean to punish ourselves for writing? For the transgression? I don’t know.