I like commas. I detest semi-colons — I don’t think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn’t need them, they were fly-specks on the page.

Doctorow is articulating an aesthetic of prose that privileges rhythm, clarity, and the illusion of unmediated voice over typographical signaling. Commas, for him, serve the breath and cadence of sentences, while semicolons feel like self-conscious “writerly” machinery that interrupts narrative flow. His rejection of quotation marks aligns with a modernist/late-modernist tendency to minimize visual clutter so dialogue merges seamlessly into the narrative texture. Calling quotation marks “fly-specks” suggests they distract the eye and remind the reader of the page as an artifact, undermining immersion. The remark also implies confidence in craft: if the writing is precise, readers can track speech and speaker without heavy punctuation scaffolding.