Top 100 Doctorow Quotes
#1. About the time you might start to think that science fiction - the real stuff, not the species of fantasy that goes under the name - is really dead, along comes a story by Cory Doctorow.
Lois Tilton
#2. I remember when I was in school I had this teacher give me this E.L. Doctorow quote: They asked him how much historical research he does for his books and he said, 'As little as possible.' So I try and adhere to that.
Scott Snyder
#3. If I wrote a Jewish superhero, he'd have awesome time-traveling powers. I'd call him Doctorow.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#4. Like most gunters, I voted to reelect Cory Doctorow and Wil Wheaton (again). There were no term limits, and those two geezers had been doing a kick-ass job of protecting user rights for over a decade.
Ernest Cline
#5. In graduate school, I was a student of E.L. Doctorow, and he had us read 'Moby-Dick' in a week.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#7. Well, I don't know. It's long, it's longer than both of the other books put together, so it's more ambitious. I think I get under the skin of the people a lot more than in the other books.
Cory Doctorow
#8. 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
#9. The important thing about security systems isn't how they work, it's how they fail.
Cory Doctorow
#10. 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
#11. And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.
E.L. Doctorow
#12. If this prinicpal thinks blogging isn't educational, he needs his head examined: he should be seeking out every student blogger in the school and giving them special time to blog more - and giving them extra credit besides.
Cory Doctorow
#13. It was like finding Attila the Hun at a yoga class. Like finding Darth Vader playing ultimate Frisbee in the park. Like finding Megatron volunteering at a children's hospital. Like finding Nightmare Moon having a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese.
Cory Doctorow
#14. The other one I did was 'I, Robot.' I take apart Isaac Asimov's Robots world.
Cory Doctorow
#15. I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything.
E.L. Doctorow
#16. The genome of every human cell has memory. You know what that means? As evolved beings we have in our genes memories of the far past, of long-ago generations, memories of experiences not our own.
E.L. Doctorow
#17. Each generation of rabbis is necessarily less perfect than the rabbis that came before, since each generation is more removed from the perfection of the Garden. Therefore, no rabbi is allowed to overturn any of his forebears' wisdom, since they are all, by definition, smarter than him.
Cory Doctorow
#18. The proprietary advantage once enjoyed by companies who assembled teams under their own roofs and used them only on their own products has been surrendered in the rush to attain some semblance of "lean, efficient" flexibility.
Cory Doctorow
#19. I have a number of vices, one of which is moderation.
E.L. Doctorow
#20. 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
#21. Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.
E.L. Doctorow
#22. The music of the Stones pounds the air like the amplified pulse of my erection.
E.L. Doctorow
#23. I'd rather be a criminal underground than a secret police.
Cory Doctorow
#24. I remember holding her in my arms and absolving God of meaninglessness.
E.L. Doctorow
#25. I think that this misses out on some of the interesting narrative realities, which is that it actually doesn't work very well, that eliminating diversity is actually a really good way to make a species and its individuals less robust.
Cory Doctorow
#26. 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
#27. The Shadow had no imagination. He neither looked at naked women nor thought of ridding the world of dictators like Hitler or Mussolini.
E.L. Doctorow
#28. It was the fact that there was all this terrible stuff and no one seemed to be able to do anything about it.
Cory Doctorow
#29. I can assure you Ernest Hemingway was wrong when he said modern American literature began with Huckleberry Finn. It begins with Moby-Dick, the book that swallowed European civilization whole.
E.L. Doctorow
#30. And what if neutrinos in their uncountable multitudinous dark-matteredness gravitationally directing the universe ... are the souls of the dead?
E.L. Doctorow
#31. It may be hard to monetize fame, but it is impossible to monetize obscurity.
Cory Doctorow
#32. Your problem is, you're trying to understand it. You need to just do it.
Cory Doctorow
#33. The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
E.L. Doctorow
#34. When in problem, or in doubt, run in cirles, scream and shout
Cory Doctorow
#35. 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
#36. The difference between reading a story and studying a story is the difference between living the story and killing the story and looking at its guts.
Cory Doctorow
#37. 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
#38. It's as if the railroad were looming on the horizon, and the most visionary thing the futurists of the day can think of to say about it is that these iron horses will have a disastrous effect on the hardworking manufacturers of oat-bags for horses.
Cory Doctorow
#39. The voice of the Constitution is the inescapably solemn self-consciousness of the people giving the law unto themselves.
E.L. Doctorow
#40. You're taking the bus around Burbank?" Lester said. "Christ, Perry, this is Los Angeles. Even homeless people drive cars.
Cory Doctorow
#41. A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.
E.L. Doctorow
#42. I hate that," I said. "It's like there's no human beings in the chain of responsibility, just things-that-happen. It's the ultimate cop-out. The system did it. The company did it. The government did it. What about the person who pulls the trigger?
Cory Doctorow
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. I can't go underground for a year, ten years, my whole life, waiting for freedom to be handed to me. Freedom is something you have to take for yourself.
Cory Doctorow
#46. Put simply, I want to treat my readers as partners and not crooks. There is no future in calling your most active promoters crooks.
Cory Doctorow
#47. 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
#48. [The way I work] is like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
(The Paris Review, Winter 1986, No. 101)
E.L. Doctorow
#49. It's a story of little girls who are pressed into working in sweat shops in games, who spend all day doing repetitive grinding tasks like making shirts, which are then converted into gold and sold on eBay.
Cory Doctorow
#50. There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.
E.L. Doctorow
#51. Beneath the red crosses was another insignia: CHP. California Highway Patrol. They were State Troopers.
Cory Doctorow
#52. This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacy.
Cory Doctorow
#53. People actually like supporting the artists whose work they like. It makes them feel happy. You don't have to force them. And if you force them, they don't feel as good.
Cory Doctorow
#54. Perhaps we all reappear, perhaps all our lives are impositions one on another.
E.L. Doctorow
#55. Communism is an interesting thing to do, nothing I ever want to be.
Cory Doctorow
#56. The Kindle is a "roach motel" device: its license terms and DRM ensure that books can check in, but they can't check out.
Cory Doctorow
#57. Everything good in the world comes from the efforts of people who came before us.
Cory Doctorow
#58. It is a mistake to let aesthetics drive your rational decision making.
Cory Doctorow
#59. Langley would never complete his newspaper project. I knew that and I'm sure he knew it as well. It was a crazy foolish hand-rubbing scheme that kept his mind in the mood he liked to be in.
E.L. Doctorow
#60. I've always loved just learning stuff for its own sake. Just to be smarter about the world around me.
Cory Doctorow
#61. It seems to me that in literature, books have always been answers to other books.
E.L. Doctorow
#62. I don't know anything about press conferences."
"Oh, just Google it. I'm sure someone's written an article on holding a successful one. I mean, if the President can manage it, I'm sure you can. He looks like he can barely tie his shoes without help.
Cory Doctorow
#64. I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech.
E.L. Doctorow
#65. 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
#66. Things that appear on the front page of the newspaper as 'fact' are far more dangerous than the games played by a novelist, and can lead to wars.
E.L. Doctorow
#67. I think that I was too self-centered to ever develop good skills as a peacemaker. In my younger days, I assumed that it was because I was smarter than everyone else, with no patience for explaining things in short words for mouthbreathers who just didn't get it.
Cory Doctorow
#68. 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
#69. Marcus is a great example of that way of thinking. He's always looking for ways a security system fails.
Cory Doctorow
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. So far, I've managed to spend more time free than behind bars. Paranoia is my friend.
Cory Doctorow
#75. God has raised his hand to give us respite. It could be he has something more in mind for us. With this time on our hands, we should try to figure out what it could be. Because HE don't do pointless acts of charity.
E.L. Doctorow
#76. And why is Grant so solemn today upon our great achievement, except he knows this unmeaning inhuman planet will need our warring imprint to give it value, and that our civil war, the devastating manufacture of the bones of our sons, is but a war after a war, a war before a war.
E.L. Doctorow
#77. When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.
Cory Doctorow
#78. I'm suspicious of any plan to fix unfairness that starts with 'step one, dismantle the entire system and replace it with a better one,' especially if you can't do anything else until step one is done.
Cory Doctorow
#79. 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
#80. I worry about images. Images are what things mean.
E.L. Doctorow
#81. It was funny how I could feel all alone and under surveillance at the same time.
Cory Doctorow
#82. What's the point of a houseful of books you've already read?
Cory Doctorow
#83. Poems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images.
E.L. Doctorow
#84. Giant letters march across the dome of the sky: HOME NOT FOUND. Huw, who knows Comic Sans when she sees it, winces in mild disgust.
Cory Doctorow
#85. Consciousness without world is impossible, just as there is no sight without the light to see by. Is that your objection,
E.L. Doctorow
#86. Implications of treason are fed like cubes of sugar to the twelve-headed animal which is justice. In ... opening remarks. In the way questions are asked. In support of lines of questioning where cases of treason are cited and the Judge endorses the relevance of the citation.
E.L. Doctorow
#87. Skipping school isn't a crime. It's an infraction. They're totally different.
Cory Doctorow
#88. 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.
E.L. Doctorow
#89. Making stuff: The folks at Instructables have put up some killer HOWTOs for building the technology in this book. It's easy and incredibly fun. There's nothing so rewarding in this world as making stuff, especially stuff that makes you more free.
Cory Doctorow
#90. Images break with a small ping, their destruction is as wonderful as their being, they are essentially instruments of torture exploding through the individual's calloused capacity to feel undifferentiated emotions full of longing and dissatisfaction and monumentality.
E.L. Doctorow
#91. Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.
E.L. Doctorow
#92. I have been everywhere because I don't know what I'm looking for.
E.L. Doctorow
#93. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.
Cory Doctorow
#94. You want God? Don't look at Scripture, look everywhere, at the planets, the constellations, the universe. Look at a bug, a flea. Look at the manifold wonders of creation, including the Nazis. That's the kind of God you're dealing with.
E.L. Doctorow
#95. 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
#96. The first casualty of any battle is the plan of attack.
Cory Doctorow
#97. Of course, it couldn't last. Those whom the gods would destroy utterly, they first give a taste of heaven.
Cory Doctorow
#98. 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
#99. Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor.
Cory Doctorow
#100. Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.
Cory Doctorow
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