E. L. Doctorow Quotes

62 Sourced Quotes

It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

E. L. Doctorow
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

E. L. Doctorow
Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.

E. L. Doctorow
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
I have committed many sins in my life. This precise sin-the sin against poets-is without absolution.

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

E. L. Doctorow
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
We are able to walk on air, but only as long as our illusion supports us.

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

E. L. Doctorow
You can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again.

E. L. Doctorow
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
When you see a manuscript as an editor…you're at ease in the book the way a surgeon is at ease in a human chest, with all the blood and the guts and everything. You're familiar with the material and you can toss it around and say dirty things to the nurse.

E. L. Doctorow
And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.

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

E. L. Doctorow
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
There is really no fiction or non-fiction; there is only narrative. One mode of perception has no greater claim on the truth than the other; that the distance has perhaps to do with distance - narrative distance - from the characters; it has to do with the kind of voice that is talking, but it certainly hasn't to do with the common distribution between fact and imagination.

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

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

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

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

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

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

E. L. Doctorow