E.L. Doctorow quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by E.L. Doctorow

E.L. Doctorow Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from E.L. Doctorow on Wise Famous Quotes.

Time seems to me a drift, a shifting of sand. And my mind is shifting with it. I am wearing away.

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.

A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.

The music of the Stones pounds the air like the amplified pulse of my erection.

I am telling you what I know - words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.

It's a kind of jail, the brain's mind. We've got these mysterious three-pound brains and they jail us.

I remember holding her in my arms and absolving God of meaninglessness.

It may be that the most avid readers of new fiction in America today are film producers, an indication of the trouble were in.

To have the regard of one's peers is immensely moving.

The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.

I have been everywhere because I don't know what I'm looking for.

The philosophical conservative is someone willing to pay the price of other people s suffering for his principles.

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

I've had very little experience in my life. In fact, I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.

Perhaps we all reappear, perhaps all our lives are impositions one on another.

I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.

Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.

I asked this question: How can I think about my brain when it's my brain doing the thinking? So is this brain pretending to be me thinking about it?

Jacqueline, for how many days have I been without food. There was a crash, the whole house shook. Where is Langley? Where is my brother?

When I'm writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences.

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.

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing.

I got married very early, and in no time at all, we had three children. And it seemed to me I had an obligation to support them.

A writer of books has to admit that film is the enemy, and that in my case I have been sleeping with the enemy.

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.

My books start almost before I realise it. Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now.'

I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist.

We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy.

The theory of the teacher with all these immigrant kids was that if you spoke English loudly enough they would eventually understand.

...if justice cannot be made to operate under the worst possible conditions of social hysteria, what does it matter how it operates at other times?

In fiction, you know, there are no borders. You can go anywhere.

The experience of experience is untransmittable.

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.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

The voice of the Constitution is the inescapably solemn self-consciousness of the people giving the law unto themselves.

And when a song is good, a standard, we recognize it as expressing a truth. Like a formula, it can apply to everyone, not just the singer.

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.

Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.

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.

If you feel a bump on page one hundred, it may be you went off on page fifty.

You're nothing more than a clever prostitute. You accepted the conditions in which you found yourself and you triumphed.

Children have a lot more to worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read.

Orthodox devotions that do not let in the light of modern knowledge are no more than a form of ancestor worship.

It is the law of wealth that such people only profit from the money that is taken from them.

19. I wrote in my notebook that even if all the possible scientific questions are answered, our problem is still not touched at all.

One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing.

My sense of what a book should be has changed so radically. I like to think for the better.

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.

Anyone at any age is able to tell the story of his or her life with authority.

It seems to me that in literature, books have always been answers to other books.

Happiness consists of living in the dailiness of life and not knowing how happy you are. True happiness comes of not knowing you're happy.

There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.

I have a number of vices, one of which is moderation.

Longing, the hope for fulfillment, is the one unwavering passion of the world's commerce.

The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.

Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.

I worry about images. Images are what things mean.

When you're working well, you don't do research. Whatever you need comes to you.

Most people are quiet in the world, and live in it tentatively, as if it were not their own.

I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech.

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.

I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything.

The marriage seemed to flourish on Father's extended absences. " Ragtime

Whenever citizens are seen routinely as enemies of their own government, writers are rountinely seen to be the most dangerous enemies.

Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.

Communists have no respect for people, only for positions.

A new reader shouldn't be able to find you in your work, though someone who's read more may begin to.

Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.

A book is not complete until it's read

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

I take the position that true faith is not a supersessional knowledge. It cannot discard the intellect.

Dad is always hiding in his book.

[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

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.

Morgan had ordered a light lunch. They did not say much as they dined without other

He was a moody, distracted young fellow, and it was clear his own mind was more company to him than people were.

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.

I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.

It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.

And what if neutrinos in their uncountable multitudinous dark-matteredness gravitationally directing the universe ... are the souls of the dead?

Support of the Mexican Revolution. He hadn't known

The forms of life were volatile and that everything in the world could as easily be something else.

I'm Homer, the blind brother.

Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.

The poem is a cry of the unborn heart. Yes, because the poem perfectly embodies the world, there is no world without poem.

Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.

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.

Planning to write is not writing.

Poems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images.

Father looked at her and she was beautiful in the way she had been as a girl. He did not realize the pleasure he felt in having made her cry.

We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time.

It was as if God had decreed this characterless engagement of brainless forces as his answer to the human presumption.

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.

We are all good friends. Friendship is what endures. Shared ideals, respect for the whole character of a human being.

A book begins as a private excitement of the mind.

The images of things are not the things in themselves.

Consciousness without world is impossible, just as there is no sight without the light to see by. Is that your objection,

When crime was working as it was supposed to it was very dull. Very lucrative and very dull.

The Shadow had no imagination. He neither looked at naked women nor thought of ridding the world of dictators like Hitler or Mussolini.