E. L. Doctorow Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

E. L. Doctorow
I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

E. L. Doctorow
I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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