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E. L. Doctorow Short Quotes
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Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
E. L. Doctorow
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I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.
E. L. Doctorow
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There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.
E. L. Doctorow
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Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.
E. L. Doctorow
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Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.
E. L. Doctorow
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We are able to walk on air, but only as long as our illusion supports us.
E. L. Doctorow
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The music of the Stones pounds the air like the amplified pulse of my erection.
E. L. Doctorow
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A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.
E. L. Doctorow
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I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything.
E. L. Doctorow
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There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.
E. L. Doctorow
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We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time.
E. L. Doctorow
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Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.
E. L. Doctorow
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The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
E. L. Doctorow
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Longing, the hope for fulfillment, is the one unwavering passion of the world's commerce.
E. L. Doctorow
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Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.
E. L. Doctorow
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Most people are quiet in the world, and live in it tentatively, as if it were not their own.
E. L. Doctorow
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Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.
E. L. Doctorow
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Time seems to me a drift, a shifting of sand. And my mind is shifting with it. I am wearing away.
E. L. Doctorow
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I have committed many sins in my life. This precise sin-the sin against poets-is without absolution.
E. L. Doctorow
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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
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Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.
E. L. Doctorow
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The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport and a library card.
E. L. Doctorow
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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
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The philosophical conservative is someone willing to pay the price of other people s suffering for his principles.
E. L. Doctorow
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We are all good friends. Friendship is what endures. Shared ideals, respect for the whole character of a human being.
E. L. Doctorow
Quote of the day
Every hand and every hour should be devoted to rescue the world from its insanity of guilt, and to assuage the pangs of human hearts with balm and anodyne. To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike.
Horace Mann
E. L. Doctorow
Creative Commons
Born:
January 6, 1931
Died:
July 21, 2015
(aged 84)
E. L. Doctorow Quotes
E. L. Doctorow Short Quotes
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