E. L. Doctorow Quotes

62 Sourced Quotes

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
I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.

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
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
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.

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

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

E. L. Doctorow
And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.

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 don't want a style. This was something that I was trying to explain earlier, that I want the book to invent itself. I think that the minute a writer knows what his style is, he's finished. Because then you see your own limits, and you hear your own voice in your head. At that point you might as well close up shop.

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

E. L. Doctorow
One of my children once said — it was a terrible truth, too, and, of course, it had to be a young child who said this — "Dad is always hiding in his book."

E. L. Doctorow
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
Lullabies, school songs, anthems, battle hymns, work songs, chanteys, love songs, bawdy songs, laments, requiems. They're there in every age of life, for every occasion, in the sepulchral voices of the choir, in the stomp and shout of the whorehourse piano player. But all songs are songs of justification.

E. L. Doctorow
When you're talking about a story you're writing it. You're sending it out into the air, it's finished, it's gone.

E. L. Doctorow
In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state... It's become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.

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

E. L. Doctorow
My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.

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

E. L. Doctorow
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
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

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

E. L. Doctorow
In this country we tend to be naive about history. We think it's Newton's perfect mechanical universe, out there predictably for everyone to see and set their watches by. But it's more like curved space, and infinitely compressible and expandable time. It's constant subatomic chaos.

E. L. Doctorow