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

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

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

E. L. Doctorow
A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.

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

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
There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.

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

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

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

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

E. L. Doctorow
Murders are exciting and lift people into a heart-beating awe as religion is supposed to do, after seeing one in the street young couples will go back to bed and make love, people will cross themselves and thank God for the gift of their stuporous lives, old folks will talk to each other over cups of hot water with lemon because murders are enlivened sermons to be analyzed and considered and relished, they speak to the timid of the dangers of rebellion, murders are perceived as momentary descents of God and so provide joy and hope and righteous satisfaction to parishioners, who will talk about them for years afterward to anyone who will listen.

E. L. Doctorow
Satire's nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.

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

E. L. Doctorow