Top 100 E.L. Doctorow Quotes
#1. Here's how it goes: I'm up at the stroke of 10 or 10:30. I have breakfast and read the papers, and then it's lunchtime. Then maybe a little nap after lunch and out to the gym, and before I know it, it's time to have a drink.
E.L. Doctorow
#2. Suffering isn't a moral endowment. People don't always do well under duress, and it seemed to me to be truer to a fellow in that situation to make him angry.
E.L. Doctorow
#3. I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything.
E.L. Doctorow
#4. I have a number of vices, one of which is moderation.
E.L. Doctorow
#5. One day you stepped in snow, the next in mud, water soaked in your boots and froze them at night, it was the next worst thing to pure blizzardry, it was weather that wouldn't let you settle.
E.L. Doctorow
#6. Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.
E.L. Doctorow
#7. I remember holding her in my arms and absolving God of meaninglessness.
E.L. Doctorow
#8. A message of consolation to Greek brothers in their prison camps, and to my Haitian brothers and Nicaraguan brothers and Dominican brothers and South African brothers and Spanish brothers and to my brothers in South Vietnam, all in their prison camps: You are in the free world!
E.L. Doctorow
#9. And what if neutrinos in their uncountable multitudinous dark-matteredness gravitationally directing the universe ... are the souls of the dead?
E.L. Doctorow
#10. All over the world today, not just in the totalitarian countries, assiduous functionaries in Ministries of Truth are clubbing history dumb and rendering language insensible.
E.L. Doctorow
#11. 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 ... Except the act of writing.
E.L. Doctorow
#12. What we call fiction is the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies ... Fiction is democratic, it reasserts the authority of the single mind to make and remake the world.
E.L. Doctorow
#13. The theory of the teacher with all these immigrant kids was that if you spoke English loudly enough they would eventually understand.
E.L. Doctorow
#14. I've always felt, as a writer, that radicals are fascinating because they're relations, they have a place in the American family. They're the relatives everyone wishes would go away. They're the embarrassments to decorum and good taste.
E.L. Doctorow
#15. Perhaps we all reappear, perhaps all our lives are impositions one on another.
E.L. Doctorow
#16. It seems to me that in literature, books have always been answers to other books.
E.L. Doctorow
#17. My father was the proprietor of a music shop on Forty-third Street, where many of the finest performers and musicians of the day would come to shop. He knew the classical repertoire inside out.
E.L. Doctorow
#18. She's some kind of Socialist-anarchist-anarcho-syndicalist-Communist. Unless you're one of them you can't tell exactly what any of them are.
E.L. Doctorow
#19. Uncharged with invisible meaning, the visible is nothing, mere clay; and without visible circumstance, a territory, to connect to, our spirit is shapeless, nameless, and undefined.
E.L. Doctorow
#20. A new reader shouldn't be able to find you in your work, though someone who's read more may begin to.
E.L. Doctorow
#21. We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy.
E.L. Doctorow
#22. I've known several cases of writers who decide to write about something and they research the hell out of it and when they're ready to write, they can't move because they are so burdened. I start writing. Whatever I need somehow comes to hand.
E.L. Doctorow
#23. It's a kind of jail, the brain's mind. We've got these mysterious three-pound brains and they jail us.
E.L. Doctorow
#24. I worry about images. Images are what things mean.
E.L. Doctorow
#25. Poems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images.
E.L. Doctorow
#26. Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.
E.L. Doctorow
#27. Leo Crowley, Harry [Truman]'s Foreign Economic Administrator, tells Congressmen the theory ... : 'If you create good governments in foreign countries, automatically you will have better markets for ourselves.' With that honeycunt staring you in the face, you'd forget your grammar too.
E.L. Doctorow
#28. So that individuation may be compared to a pyramid in that it is only achieved by the placement of the top stone ... The Jews, Ford said. They ain't like anyone else I know. There goes you theory up shits creek. He smiled.
E.L. Doctorow
#29. The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.
E.L. Doctorow
#30. A book begins as a private excitement of the mind.
E.L. Doctorow
#31. Anyone at any age is able to tell the story of his or her life with authority.
E.L. Doctorow
#32. You're nothing more than a clever prostitute. You accepted the conditions in which you found yourself and you triumphed.
E.L. Doctorow
#33. Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.
E.L. Doctorow
#34. The difference between Socrates and Jesus is that no one had ever been put to death in Socrates' name. And that is because Socrates' ideas were never made law. Law, in whatever name, protects privilege.
E.L. Doctorow
#35. It was as if God had decreed this characterless engagement of brainless forces as his answer to the human presumption.
E.L. Doctorow
#36. To have the regard of one's peers is immensely moving.
E.L. Doctorow
#37. Grandmamma had been the last connection to our past. I had understood her as some referent moral authority to whom we paid no heed, but by whose judgments we measured our waywardness.
E.L. Doctorow
#38. Congress is so beholden to the money that any solution in the general interest will be frustrated and subverted by the corporate interests who feel they will be damaged by progress, fair play and justice.
E.L. Doctorow
#39. Each book tends to have its own identity rather than the author's. It speaks from itself rather than you. Each book is unlike the others because you are not bringing the same voice to every book. I think that keeps you alive as a writer.
E.L. Doctorow
#40. It may be that the most avid readers of new fiction in America today are film producers, an indication of the trouble were in.
E.L. Doctorow
#42. My theory about why Hemingway killed himself is that he heard his own voice; that he reached the point where he couldn't write without feeling he was repeating himself. That's the worst thing that can happen to a writer.
E.L. Doctorow
#43. There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.
E.L. Doctorow
#44. The poem is a cry of the unborn heart. Yes, because the poem perfectly embodies the world, there is no world without poem.
E.L. Doctorow
#45. Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
E.L. Doctorow
#47. Whenever citizens are seen routinely as enemies of their own government, writers are rountinely seen to be the most dangerous enemies.
E.L. Doctorow
#48. The businessmen wondered if they could create such individuals not from the accidents of news events but from the deliberate manufactures of their own medium.
E.L. Doctorow
#49. Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.
E.L. Doctorow
#50. The act of composition is a series of discoveries.
E.L. Doctorow
#51. I can walk into a bookstore and hand over my credit card and they don't know who the hell I am. Maybe that says something about bookstore clerks.
E.L. Doctorow
#52. 9.01 Nausea catalogs the indigestible contents of the stomach that are to be brought up.
9.02 Memory that is nauseating catalogs the contents of the mind that can never be brought up.
E.L. Doctorow
#53. Children have a lot more to worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read.
E.L. Doctorow
#55. Because like all whores you value propriety. You are creature of capitalism, the ethics of which are so totally corrupt and hypocritical that your beauty is no more than the beauty of gold, which is to say false and cold and useless.
E.L. Doctorow
#56. My sense of what a book should be has changed so radically. I like to think for the better.
E.L. Doctorow
#57. To Morgan, the disfigurement of his monstrous nose was the touch of God upon him, the assurance of mortality. It was the steadiest assurance he had.
E.L. Doctorow
#58. People come out of the mid-west and go to the Ivy League. I kind of reversed the direction.
E.L. Doctorow
#59. And why? Is our genius only in our wombs? Can we not write books and create learned scholarship and perform music and provide philosophical models for the betterment of mankind?
E.L. Doctorow
#60. It is the immigrant hordes who keep this country alive, the waves of them arriving year after year ... Who believes in America more than the people who run down the gangplank and kiss the ground?
E.L. Doctorow
#61. Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.
E.L. Doctorow
#62. I am telling you what I know - words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.
E.L. Doctorow
#63. I lived in New York for a couple months. It seemed to me at first an incredibly clean place with well-dressed people and washed cars and bright-painted red-and-yellow streetcars and white buildings.
E.L. Doctorow
#64. It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.
E.L. Doctorow
#65. [Freud] "sat in his quiet cozy study in Vienna, glad to be back. He said to Ernest Jones, America is a mistake, a gigantic mistake." Ragtime
E.L. Doctorow
#66. A period of time is as much an organising principle for a work of fiction as a sense of place. You can do geography, as Faulkner did, or you can dwell on a particular period. It provides the same framework.
E.L. Doctorow
#67. The marriage seemed to flourish on Father's extended absences. " Ragtime
E.L. Doctorow
#68. Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
E.L. Doctorow
#69. It is the law of wealth that such people only profit from the money that is taken from them.
E.L. Doctorow
#70. The philosophical conservative is someone willing to pay the price of other people s suffering for his principles.
E.L. Doctorow
#71. Orthodox devotions that do not let in the light of modern knowledge are no more than a form of ancestor worship.
E.L. Doctorow
#72. History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.
E.L. Doctorow
#73. Time seems to me a drift, a shifting of sand. And my mind is shifting with it. I am wearing away.
E.L. Doctorow
#74. Morgan had ordered a light lunch. They did not say much as they dined without other
E.L. Doctorow
#75. IS IT SO TERRIBLE NOT TO KEEP THE MATTER IN MY HEART, TO GET THE MATTER OUT OF MY HEART, TO EMPTY MY HEART OF THIS MATTER? WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH MY HEART?
E.L. Doctorow
#76. The theory for admitting accomplice testimony that is uncorroborated is that conspiracy is by its nature secretive and that only the parties to it can know it occurred. But in practice this means the accomplice's guilt is modified to the degree that he can convict the defendant.
E.L. Doctorow
#77. I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries just the way the reader does, so you're simultaneously the writer and the reader.
E.L. Doctorow
#78. I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them.
E.L. Doctorow
#79. And so do people pass out of one's life and all you can remember of them is their humanity, a poor fitful thing of no dominion, like your own.
E.L. Doctorow
#80. The bad news is that if we do in fact get off the earth we will contaminate the rest of the universe with our moral insufficiency.
E.L. Doctorow
#81. And now I will tell of the revels that went on for three nights and two days in the brothel on West Seventy-sixth Street between Columbus and Amsterdam avenues.
E.L. Doctorow
#82. Somewhere along the line the rhythms and tonalities of music elided in my brain with the sounds that words make and the rhythm that sentences have.
E.L. Doctorow
#83. Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.
E.L. Doctorow
#84. From my undergraduate days, I've always been interested in the major philosophical questions that don't seem to have an answer that everyone agrees on.
E.L. Doctorow
#85. Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing.
E.L. Doctorow
#86. I'm not the sort of writer who can walk into a party and take a look around, see who's sleeping with whom and go home and write a novel about society. It's not the way I work.
E.L. Doctorow
#87. Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
E.L. Doctorow
#88. I take the position that true faith is not a supersessional knowledge. It cannot discard the intellect.
E.L. Doctorow
#89. We are all good friends. Friendship is what endures. Shared ideals, respect for the whole character of a human being.
E.L. Doctorow
#90. We dress them [children] in the presumptions of the world. They are the bright small face of hope. They are the last belief we have, the belief in making them believe.
E.L. Doctorow
#91. The forms of life were volatile and that everything in the world could as easily be something else.
E.L. Doctorow
#92. Somehow he had catapulted himself beyond the world's value system. But this very fact lay upon him an awesome responsibility to maintain the illusions of other men.
E.L. Doctorow
#93. I am thus led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative ... A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.
E.L. Doctorow
#94. It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.
E.L. Doctorow
#95. For a moment he thought the chair was aligned, but then he decided it was not. He moved it another turn to the right. He tried sitting in the chair now but it still felt peculiar. He turned it again. Eventually he made a complete circle and still he could not find the proper alignment for the chair.
E.L. Doctorow
#96. These officials changed names they couldn't pronounce and tore people from their families, consigning to a return voyage old folks, people with bad eyes, riffraff and also those who looked insolent. Such power was dazzling. The immigrants were reminded of home. " Ragtime
E.L. Doctorow
#97. Where most people live, most of us, imagining it to be the real sunlit world when it is only a cave lit by the flickering fires of illusion.
E.L. Doctorow
#98. Longing, the hope for fulfillment, is the one unwavering passion of the world's commerce.
E.L. Doctorow
#99. The experience of experience is untransmittable.
E.L. Doctorow
#100. I started on computers with 'Billy Bathgate,' a little orange screen with black letters. I thought it was really cool, but it actually slowed me up for a while because it's so easy to revise, I tended to stay on the same page. I've learned to discipline myself.
E.L. Doctorow
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