E. L. Doctorow Quotes

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.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

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

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.

I like commas. I detest semi-colons — I don’t think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn’t need them, they were fly-specks on the page.

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing - none of that is writing. Writing is writing. Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

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

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

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

The Shadow had no imagination. He neither looked at naked women nor thought of ridding the world of dictators like Hitler or Mussolini.

A new reader shouldn't be able to find you in your work, though someone who's read more may begin to.

Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.

If you feel a bump on page one hundred, it may be you went off on page fifty.

When you're working well, you don't do research. Whatever you need comes to you.

Leo Crowley, Harry [Truman]'s Foreign Economic Administrator, tells Congressmen the theory...: 'If you create good governments in foreign countries, automatically you will have better markets for ourselves.' With that honeycunt staring you in the face, you'd forget your grammar too.

A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.

I worry about images. Images are what things mean.

Movies are too literal.

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.

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.

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.

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

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

Children have a lot more to worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read.

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

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.

What we call fiction is the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies....Fiction is democratic, it reasserts the authority of the single mind to make and remake the world.

The theory of the teacher with all these immigrant kids was that if you spoke English loudly enough they would eventually understand.

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.

Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.

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.

The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.

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

I have been everywhere because I don't know what I'm looking for.

I knew he was unreliable, but he was fun to be with. He was a child’s ideal companion, full of surprises and happy animal energy. He enjoyed food and drink. He liked to try new things. He brought home coconuts, papayas, mangoes, and urged them on our reluctant conservative selves. On Sundays he liked to discover new places, take us on endless bus or trolley rides to some new park or beach he knew about. He always counseled daring, in whatever situation, the courage to test the unknown, an instruction that was thematically in opposition to my mother’s.

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

We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy.

We are all good friends. Friendship is what endures. Shared ideals, respect for the whole character of a human being.

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.

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.

I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.

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

It may be that the most avid readers of new fiction in America today are film producers, an indication of the trouble were in.

The poem is a cry of the unborn heart. Yes, because the poem perfectly embodies the world, there is no world without poem.

Dad is always hiding in his book.

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

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.

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.