E. L. Doctorow - Life Quotes

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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

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

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

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

E. L. Doctorow

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

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

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

E. L. Doctorow