E.L. Doctorow Quotes & Sayings

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon. — E.L. Doctorow

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing. — E.L. Doctorow

If we ever find out how the brain works, with all its complexity, then we will be able to build a machine that has consciousness. And if that happens, that is a road to planetary disaster because everything we've thought about ourselves, since the Bronze Age, the Bible, all of that will be gone. — E.L. Doctorow

He was a moody, distracted young fellow, and it was clear his own mind was more company to him than people were. — E.L. Doctorow

In those days, this was years for the sputnik thing, it was customary to downgrade the Russians' science. People who know something about those things didn't make that mistake. But at the level of Time magazine the joke was how they copied everything and claimed it for their own. Well, of course the corollary of that is that it's our bomb they have and that means we were betrayed. After the war our whole foreign policy depended on our having the bomb and the Soviets not having it. It was a terrible miscalculation. It militarized the world. And when they got it the only alternative to admitting our bankruptcy of leadership and national vision was to find conspiracies. It was one or the other. — E.L. Doctorow

To Morgan, the disfigurement of his monstrous nose was the touch of God upon him, the assurance of mortality. It was the steadiest assurance he had. — 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

In fiction, you know, there are no borders. You can go anywhere. — E.L. Doctorow

[The way I work] is like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

(The Paris Review, Winter 1986, No. 101) — E.L. Doctorow

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

Suffering isn't a moral endowment. People don't always do well under duress, and it seemed to me to be truer to a fellow in that situation to make him angry. — E.L. Doctorow

Jacqueline, for how many days have I been without food. There was a crash, the whole house shook. Where is Langley? Where is my brother? — E.L. Doctorow

He wondered seriously if love wasn't a feeling at all but a simple characterless state of shared isolation. If you were alone with a woman your feelings might change from moment to moment but the circumstance of your shared fate did not change. Maybe that's where the love was, in the combined circumstance. — 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 can assure you Ernest Hemingway was wrong when he said modern American literature began with Huckleberry Finn. It begins with Moby-Dick, the book that swallowed European civilization whole. — E.L. Doctorow

Happiness consists of living in the dailiness of life and not knowing how happy you are. True happiness comes of not knowing you're happy. — E.L. Doctorow

Support of the Mexican Revolution. He hadn't known — E.L. Doctorow

I remember holding her in my arms and absolving God of meaninglessness. — E.L. Doctorow

I worry about images. Images are what things mean. — E.L. Doctorow

-Of course movies today no longer require film. They are recorded and held in digital suspension as ones and zeroes. And so at the moment the last remaining piece of the world is lit and shot for a movie, there will be another Big Bang ... and the multitudes of ones and zeroes will be strewn through the universe as particles that act like waves ... until, shaken by borealic winds or ignited by solar flares or otherwise galvanized by this or that heavenly signal, they compose themselves into brilliant constellations that shine in full color across the night sky of a remote planet ... where a reverent, unrecognizable form of life will look up from its rooftops at the faces of Randolph Scott, Gail Russell, George Brent, Linda Darnell ... to name just a few of the stars. — E.L. Doctorow

I have a number of vices, one of which is moderation. — E.L. Doctorow

It's a kind of jail, the brain's mind. We've got these mysterious three-pound brains and they jail us. — E.L. Doctorow

But I can stop on any corner at the intersection of two busy streets, and before me are thousands of lives headed in all four directions, uptown downtown east and west, on foot, on bikes, on in-line skates, in buses, strollers, cars, trucks, with the subway rumble underneath my feet ... and how can I not know I am momentarily part of the most spectacular phenomenon in the unnatural world? ... The city may begin from a marketplace, a trading post, the confluence of waters, but it secretly depends on the human need to walk among strangers. — E.L. Doctorow

The genome of every human cell has memory. You know what that means? As evolved beings we have in our genes memories of the far past, of long-ago generations, memories of experiences not our own. — E.L. Doctorow

So that individuation may be compared to a pyramid in that it is only achieved by the placement of the top stone ... The Jews, Ford said. They ain't like anyone else I know. There goes you theory up shits creek. He smiled. — E.L. Doctorow

When crime was working as it was supposed to it was very dull. Very lucrative and very dull. — E.L. Doctorow

Orthodox devotions that do not let in the light of modern knowledge are no more than a form of ancestor worship. — E.L. Doctorow

Dad is always hiding in his book. — E.L. Doctorow

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. — E.L. Doctorow

Morgan had ordered a light lunch. They did not say much as they dined without other — E.L. Doctorow

I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative. — 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

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

Perhaps we all reappear, perhaps all our lives are impositions one on another. — E.L. Doctorow

No longer expecting to be beautiful and touched with grace till the end of her days, she was coming to the realization that whereas once, in his courtship, Father might have embodied the infinite possibilities of loving, he had aged and gone dull, made stupid, perhaps, by his travels and his work, so that more and more he only demonstrated his limits, that he had reached them, and that he would never move beyond them. — E.L. Doctorow

I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist. — E.L. Doctorow

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

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. — E.L. Doctorow

I've had very little experience in my life. In fact, I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad. — E.L. Doctorow

The marriage seemed to flourish on Father's extended absences. " Ragtime — E.L. Doctorow

The images of things are not the things in themselves. — E.L. Doctorow

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. — E.L. Doctorow

Nobody doan never have touch Porhl! When I little, de brudder try. Oh yeah. I raise up dis bony knee hard in his what he got dere, and dat were dat and nobody since! You hear dis gul, Mr. free man Jacob Early? And nobody since! An I ain't no Jez'bel, she screamed. In this way was Pearl's decision made, and by the time they were on the march through Milledgeville she was drummer for Clarke's company. She just hit the drum once every other step and they kept the pace, some with smiles on their faces. She looked straight ahead and kept her shoulders squared against the shoulder straps, but she could tell that white folks watched from the windows. And none of them knew she wasn't but the drummer boy they saw. — E.L. Doctorow

Emily supposed the modern world was fortunate in the progress of science. But she could not help but feel at this moment the impropriety of male invasiveness. She knew he was working to save this poor woman, but in her mind, too, was a sense of Wrede's science as adding to the abuse committed by his fellow soldiers. He said not a word. It was as if the girl were no more than the surgical challenge she offered. — E.L. Doctorow

You want God? Don't look at Scripture, look everywhere, at the planets, the constellations, the universe. Look at a bug, a flea. Look at the manifold wonders of creation, including the Nazis. That's the kind of God you're dealing with. — E.L. Doctorow

I'm Homer, the blind brother. — E.L. Doctorow

Things that appear on the front page of the newspaper as 'fact' are far more dangerous than the games played by a novelist, and can lead to wars. — E.L. Doctorow

The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity. — E.L. Doctorow

My books start almost before I realise it. Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now.' — E.L. Doctorow

And why? Is our genius only in our wombs? Can we not write books and create learned scholarship and perform music and provide philosophical models for the betterment of mankind? — E.L. Doctorow

A book begins as a private excitement of the mind. — E.L. Doctorow

One evening he appeared with an infant in his arms at the door of his ex-wife, Martha. Because Briony, his lovely young wife after Martha, had died. Of what? We'll get to that. I can't do this alone, Andrew said, as Martha stared at him from the open doorway. It happened to have been snowing that night, and Martha was transfixed by the soft creature-like snowflakes alighting on Andrew's NY Yankees hat brim. Martha was like that, enrapt by the peripheral things as if setting them to music. Even in ordinary times, she was slow to respond, looking at you with her large dark rolling protuberant eyes. Then the smile would come, or the nod, or the shake of the head. Meanwhile the heat from her home drifted through the open door and fogged up Andrew's eyeglasses. He stood there behind his foggy lenses like a blind man in the snowfall and was without volition when at last she reached out, gently took the swaddled infant from him, stepped back, and closed the door in his face. — E.L. Doctorow

We may prefer a more primitive analysis: that when you defeat an enemy you are required to eat his heart. In this way is your victory recorded with The Gods. In this way too do The Gods ensure the continuation of their amusement: you consume the heart of your enemy so that it can no longer be said of him that he exists
except as he exists in you. — E.L. Doctorow

It is the law of wealth that such people only profit from the money that is taken from them. — E.L. Doctorow

Whenever citizens are seen routinely as enemies of their own government, writers are rountinely seen to be the most dangerous enemies. — E.L. Doctorow

All over the world today, not just in the totalitarian countries, assiduous functionaries in Ministries of Truth are clubbing history dumb and rendering language insensible. — E.L. Doctorow

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

I cite too the ordinary fears of mortality the inspection of a fast-growing mole on the side of the nose blood in the stool a painful injury or the mournful witness of the slow death of a parent all this is given to all men as well as the starting awake in the nether hours of the night from such glutinous nightmare that on'e self name relationships nationality place in life all data of specificity wipe out amnesiatically asiatically you don't even know the idea human it is such a low hour of the night and he shares it with all of us. — E.L. Doctorow

Children have a lot more to worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read. — 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 music of the Stones pounds the air like the amplified pulse of my erection. — E.L. Doctorow

It seems to me that in literature, books have always been answers to other books. — E.L. Doctorow

And what if neutrinos in their uncountable multitudinous dark-matteredness gravitationally directing the universe ... are the souls of the dead? — E.L. Doctorow

Because like all whores you value propriety. You are creature of capitalism, the ethics of which are so totally corrupt and hypocritical that your beauty is no more than the beauty of gold, which is to say false and cold and useless. — 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

I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority. — E.L. Doctorow

Congress is so beholden to the money that any solution in the general interest will be frustrated and subverted by the corporate interests who feel they will be damaged by progress, fair play and justice. — E.L. Doctorow

My father was the proprietor of a music shop on Forty-third Street, where many of the finest performers and musicians of the day would come to shop. He knew the classical repertoire inside out. — E.L. Doctorow

Grandmamma had been the last connection to our past. I had understood her as some referent moral authority to whom we paid no heed, but by whose judgments we measured our waywardness. — E.L. Doctorow

The bad news is that if we do in fact get off the earth we will contaminate the rest of the universe with our moral insufficiency. — E.L. Doctorow

Satire's nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth. — E.L. Doctorow

The ultimate technological achievement will be escaping from the mess we've made. There will be none after that because we will reproduce everything that we did on earth, we'll go through the whole sequence all over again somewhere else, and people will read my paper as prophecy, and know that having gotten off one planet, they will be able to destroy another with confidence. — E.L. Doctorow

Communists have no respect for people, only for positions. — E.L. Doctorow

God has raised his hand to give us respite. It could be he has something more in mind for us. With this time on our hands, we should try to figure out what it could be. Because HE don't do pointless acts of charity. — E.L. Doctorow

IS IT SO TERRIBLE NOT TO KEEP THE MATTER IN MY HEART, TO GET THE MATTER OUT OF MY HEART, TO EMPTY MY HEART OF THIS MATTER? WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH MY HEART? — E.L. Doctorow

It has taken time and the blundering wisdom and anarchic greed of our ancestry to construct the modern city of consolidated institutions. It is a great historically amassed communal creation. If you fly above it at night, it is a jeweled wonder of the universe, floating like a giant liner on the sea of darkness. It is smart, accomplished, sophisticated, and breathtakingly beautiful. And it glimmers and sparkles as all things breakable glimmer and sparkle. You wonder how much God had to do with this, how much of the splendor and insolence of the modern city creatively built from the disparate intentions of generations of men comes of the inspiration of God. Because it is the city of the unremarked God, the sometime-thing God, the God of history. — E.L. Doctorow

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

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. — E.L. Doctorow

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

When I'm writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences. — E.L. Doctorow

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. — 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

There are two books that impressed me when I was very young. One was 'The Adventures of Augie March' - the idea of having something so generous, and so adventurous and improvisatory. The other was 'The U.S.A. Trilogy,' by John Dos Passos. — E.L. Doctorow

Consciousness without world is impossible, just as there is no sight without the light to see by. Is that your objection, — E.L. Doctorow

From my undergraduate days, I've always been interested in the major philosophical questions that don't seem to have an answer that everyone agrees on. — E.L. Doctorow

Movies are too literal. — E.L. Doctorow

I can walk into a bookstore and hand over my credit card and they don't know who the hell I am. Maybe that says something about bookstore clerks. — E.L. Doctorow

Many historians have noted an interesting phenomenon in American life in the years immediately after a war. In the councils of government fierce partisanship replaces the necessary political coalitions of wartime. IN the great arena of social relations -- business, labour, the community -- violence rises, fear and recrimination dominate public discussion, passion prevails over reason. Many historians have noted this phenomenon. It is attributed to the continuance beyond the end of the war of the war hysteria. Unfortunately, the necessary emotional fever for fighting a war cannot be turned off like a water tap. Enemies must continue to be found. The mind and heart cannot be demobilised as quickly as the platoon. On the contrary, like a fiery furnace at white heat, it takes a considerable time to cool. — 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

I've known several cases of writers who decide to write about something and they research the hell out of it and when they're ready to write, they can't move because they are so burdened. I start writing. Whatever I need somehow comes to hand. — 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

[Freud] "sat in his quiet cozy study in Vienna, glad to be back. He said to Ernest Jones, America is a mistake, a gigantic mistake." Ragtime — E.L. Doctorow

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

I am thus led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative ... A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life. — E.L. Doctorow

A writer of books has to admit that film is the enemy, and that in my case I have been sleeping with the enemy. — E.L. Doctorow

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer. — 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